Wireless technologies for the monitoring of strategic civil infrastructures: an ambient vibration test on the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Suspension Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey

Abstract

Rapid improvements in telemetry technology and the general decrease in communication costs have raised a growing interest in low-cost wireless sensing units. This is especially the case for structural monitoring purposes, where they are becoming a more valuable alternative to conventional wired monitoring system. The main advantages associated with the use of wireless sensing unit include a considerable decrease in installation costs, decentralization of data analysis, and the possibility of broadening the functional capabilities by exploiting the use, at the same time and place, of different sensors. In this work, the design of a low-cost wireless sensing unit able both to collect, analyze, store, and communicate data and estimated parameters is presented. The suitability of a network of these low-cost wireless instruments for monitoring the vibration characteristics and dynamic properties of strategic civil infrastructures is validated during a ambient vibration recording field test on the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey.

Wireless Sensor Networks and Sensor Fusion for Early Warning in Engineering Geology

“…Currently emerging areas for WSN applications in geosciences are hazard monitoring (Hartung et al 2006;Beutel et al 2009;Ramesh and Vasudevan 2012;Werner-Allen et al 2006) but also construction and construction site monitoring for safety reasons (Picozzi et al 2009;Stoianov et al 2007;Kim et al 2007;Fernandez-Steeger et al 2013). An emerging field for monitoring tools will be the safety analysis, where besides deterministic models, the observation method defining thresholds, becomes in large and limit testing projects more important.…”

Structural Health Monitoring Using Wireless Technologies: An Ambient Vibration Test on the Adolphe Bridge, Luxembourg City

“…Ditommaso et al [5] investigated the response characteristics of the Falkenhof Tower in Potsdam, Germany, using interferometric and time-frequency analysis techniques, using both ambient noise and records obtained from a near-by explosion. Prieto et al [6] performed a similar study using ambient noise records obtained in a 17-storey instrumented building at the University of California in Los Angeles, and Picozzi et al [7] tested the suitability of a system of low-cost wireless sensing units for real-time monitoring of large-scale infrastructure using the example of the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Suspension Bridge in Istanbul.…”

“…Yet as shown by Picozzi et al [7,11], these WSUs are also highly attractive for monitoring critical infrastructure. Each WSU (Figure 1(d)) is composed of a low-cost three-component seismic sensor (thus far either a build-in accelerometer or an external 4.5 Hz geophone), a digitizer board with an effective resolution of 19 bit, onboard storage capability provided by a CompactFlash card and, as the designation "wireless sensing unit" indicates, wireless data transmission capabilities.…”

“…WSUs, we refer the reader to Fleming et al [12] and Picozzi et al [7,11]. For our measurements on the Adolphe Bridge, we used a total of 18 WSUs equipped with 4.5 Hz three-component geophones as sensors, and we recorded the ambient vibrations with a sampling rate of 100 samples/sec.…”

On‐Site Early Warning and Rapid Damage Forecasting Using Single Stations: Outcomes from the REAKT Project

“…This is particularly true when considering the highly noisy environment where these kinds of installations are generally deployed. However, starting from the prototype of Straser and Kiremidjian (1998) and continuing with the realization of the Self-Organizing Seismic Early Warning Information Network (SOSEWIN) system (Fleming et al, 2009;Fischer et al, 2012), ad hoc sensors for responding to most of the above-mentioned tasks have already been designed (Picozzi, Milkereit, Zulfikar, et al, 2010;Parolai et al, 2014;Picozzi et al, 2014;, moving the remaining challenges toward defining the optimal real-time procedures and analyses to be carried out for reliable early warning and damage forecasting.…”