SHM campaign on 138 spans of railway viaducts by means of OMA and wireless sensors network

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Abstract:

Condition-based monitoring applied to railway bridges represents a topic of major importance and interest among developed countries, such as Italy. In fact, bridges and viaducts represent key components of the transportation network, and therefore they increasingly draw infrastructure managers’ attention. The present work is the result of a project carried out by Politecnico di Milano, consisting of a large experimental campaign conducted on a series of viaducts of the Italian railway network. The ensemble of structures under investigation is composed by 11 viaducts, for a total amount of spans equal to 138. According to a similarity criterion, the latter were subdivided into 8 groups, featured by different properties. Due to its transient nature, the experimental campaign was conducted by means of wireless accelerometers, and it consisted in the extraction of the main modal parameters of each analyzed viaduct span, as well as the characterization of the trains travelling on the line. Through the adoption of an operation modal analysis (OMA) technique, it was then possible to construct a large database of the dynamic features concerning the studied viaducts. This database may be exploited for future studies as an important baseline reference condition, by which potential outlier values may be captured, as a sign of damage occurrence among the monitored structures.