Summary
Roughan & O’Donovan Innovative Solutions (ROD-IS) participated in this EU-FP7 funded research project aimed at improving current monitoring techniques for road and rail bridges.
Our expertise in structural health monitoring, traffic load modelling and finite element analysis techniques enabled us to develop a virtual monitoring concept to assist in evaluating the fatigue life of steel cable-stayed bridges.
Solution
As part of a consortium of SMEs and research providers, we developed a new method of:
- Using an existing road bridge to weigh vehicles in motion
- Monitoring steel road bridges susceptible to fatigue damage
- Weighing trains in motion
- SH monitoring of railway bridges
Challenges
Performing a fatigue analysis of a cable-stayed steel box girder bridge near Rotterdam in the Netherlands provided our principle challenge.
Using traffic information from the Bridge-WIM system, we undertook scenario modelling which allowed us to simulate many years of traffic from just a few months of measurements.
The simulated traffic used in our fatigue software allowed us to calculate the accumulated damage at all points on the bridge during its lifetime.
Services provided:
- Weigh-in-motion
- Traffic load modelling
- Structural health monitoring
