Structural health monitoring of bridges using cost-effective 1-axis accelerometers

This paper proposes a structure health monitoring device (HMD) with using three 1-axis accelerometers, microprocessor, analog to digital converter (ADC), and data logger for long span bridge. The proposed monitoring system achieves the features of low cost and data synchronization of three 1-axis accelerometers. Furthermore, we develop a packet acquisition program to receive the sensed data and then classify it based on time and date. Compared with 3-axis accelerometer, our proposed 1-axis accelerometers based device achieves 64.3% cost saving. Besides, the optimal sensor number can be verified by our proposed equation with only 0.37% error in terms of sample rate. Therefore, with using the proposed device, the real-time diagnosis system for bridge damage monitoring can be conducted effectively.