Horsetail Falls Bridge in Oregon
Civil Structure Monitoring
A significant number of factors influence structure life including loading, fatigue, corrosion and temperature cycling. Our sensor systems allow you to monitor these conditions, helping you to better determine the health of the structure and identify potential problems quickly.
Keeping large civil structures in mind, we developed a long gage strain sensor specifically for measuring strain in structural members. The long gage sensor avoids problems arising from local stress concentrations while maintaining durability and resistance to electromagnetic interference. These sensors can be used alone or combined with temperature, humidity, or corrosion sensors to monitor structural health. The systems may be permanently installed or removable and continuously or periodically monitored.
Optical strain sensors have proven themselves in a project conducted in cooperation with the Oregon Department of Transportation to monitor the health of the Horsetail Falls Bridge in the Columbia River Gorge. Twenty-six sensors, including both embedded and surface mounts, were successfully used to monitor the effectiveness of strengthening the concrete beams with composite wrap and even showed an ability to monitor and classify traffic. You can learn more in our published papers on the project.
The following published papers provide examples of some of our previous work with fiber optic structural monitoring, in addition to discussion on the principles behind the sensors.
Static and Dynamic Bridge Monitoring
View all published papers
The above papers are in Adobe PDF format.
