Structural Monitoring – A technical way to protecting life

Structural monitoring is known to be an inherent part of earthquake engineering sciences. As seismology features seismic and seismo-tectonic activity information, engineering seismology converts this relevant information into useful data for earthquake engineering science. The latter park collects the information and provides both general and specific codes used by structural engineers in the design process. Due to the proportionate randomness of earthquake phenomena, each earthquake provides extra information for a specific region or brings to light new seismic faults.

 Generally, earthquakes come in different parts of the world and the primary role of structural monitoring is to define, recommend and execute effective measures against the possible adverse effects of earthquakes. The major problem lays lot only in economic losses but costing invaluable human lives. To curb this precious loss, it is very much important for us to incorporate effective structural monitoring measures in sensitive places. To protect life and limb and assist in stopping economic losses is what urges to engineers to fully master structural analysis methods and models so that the actual behaviour of the structure coincide as nearly as possible with the phenomena they expect.

 Structural monitoring, a part of the experimental process seeks to find following answers:Its major task is to carve out a dynamic model used in the design process. It validates or improves seismic design codes. During the earthquake, it estimates the structural response. It provides information used in post-earthquake actions. Structural monitoring process generally links with pre-installed automatic shutdown controls to reduce damage.

 Protecting the environment against high-risk spillage is also a major task of structural monitoring. It provides useful data to the retrofit process. It reduces the monitored structure’s post-earthquake non-operational downtime. There are basically two system architectures for structural monitoring with GPS, one based on a fixed network of sensors and the other based on mobile sensors. The following sections describe these two implementations and discuss how recent advances in GPS receiver technology are making such systems cost-effective.

Most conventional bridge monitoring systems rely on a fixed network of sensors that transmit their data back to a central site for processing and analysis. This is also a useful architecture for GPS-based systems. In the ARL:UT bridge deformation monitoring system (BDMS), sensor nodes are mounted on the structure at sites of interest. For measuring long-term movement _ such as foundation settlement, creep, stress relaxation, and others _ the sensor nodes are mounted over the bridge piers. For measuring shorter term motion, such as that caused by wind or traffic loading, the sensors are mounted between piers.

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