Smart Structural Health Monitoring for High-Speed Railway Bridges

Abstract

The management of ageing civil infrastructure represents one of the most pressing challenges of modern societies. The last Infrastructure Report Card of the American Society of Civil Engineers (2017) estimated that 39% of the more than 600.000 bridges in USA are over 50 years old and estimated the rehabilitation costs at $123 billion. A similar picture emerges across Europe. Spain counts more than 2.606 km of high-speed railway, and a total of 207 critical bridges. An important number of them presents of one form of degradation or damage. The replacement rate is very low and that means an increase of ageing bridges in the next years. Despite large financial efforts have been dedicated to research in this field, the methodology has not been successfully completed/integrated, and life-extension of bridges is still sparsely implemented in practice. The last report of the European Joint Research Centre warned about the weak link between research and the wide-scale adoption of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) technologies. The economic efficiency of the bridge is the total life cycle cost divided by its service life. New alternatives such as reliability-centered maintenance and reconditioning programs play an ever increasingly important role. However, these improvements are just the first glimpse of an ambitious and promising opportunity: bridge life-extension. To address these deficiencies the present methodology involves important advances on the real application of: SHM methodologies for high-speed railway ageing infrastructures, smart sensors, energy autonomy of the long-term monitoring system, and structural prognosis based on data-driven decision making.