Urban highway bridge structure health assessments using wireless sensor network

This paper presents a wireless sensor network for assessing the structural health of urban highway bridges. Sensor data were collected on two pre-stressed box beam bridges (PSBB) with eight wireless sensor nodes. The wireless sensor was able to collect one hundred Accelerometer data samples per second without losing any wireless sensor data. Application software was developed to transform the sample data into frequency domain. Sensor data from all eight wireless sensor nodes have shown the similar peak frequencies with multiple trial runs on the same bridge. The peak frequency component was unique to each highway bridge. The signal to noise ratio in frequency domain is greater than seven to one. By comparing the actual wireless sensor data with the predictions from a finite element bridge model, a hypothesis of evaluating the structural health of the bridge was presented.