Monitoring of the new Arsta railway bridge using traditional and fiber optic sensors

Stockholm consists of several islands connected by a number of bridges. Many of these bridges need to be repaired or replaced because of their age. Replacing and repairing existing bridges are of economic concern for many local authorities and governments. In order to minimize the costs for reparation and maintenance and to ensure the safety of civil infrastructures, there is an increasing need in our society for health monitoring of bridges. Monitoring helps us to understand the real behavior of the structure and lets us verify the design uncertainties. It is clear that monitoring will have a major role in the design of the future structures, and suitable monitoring systems will be designed together with the structures. The new Årsta Railway Bridge, which is under construction in Stockholm, is an optimized and very complex ten-span pre-stressed concrete structure. Each span has a length of 78 meters. The Swedish National Railway Administration (Banverket) has initiated a measuring campaign in order to study and understand the dynamic and static behavior of the bridge. The main objectives are: firstly, to monitor the bridge during the first 10 years including construction and testing period, and secondly, for the static study, to compare traditional measuring technique using strain transducers developed at Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, Sweden, with the fiber optic sensors developed by SMARTEC, Switzerland. After a short overview of the existing measurement systems and technique for measuring civil infrastructures, the paper illustrates the installation of KTH's and SMARTEC's monitoring systems. In addition, some very early results are included.