Structural Health Monitoring of Railroad Bridges - Research Needs and Preliminary Results

The initial content of this paper presents results of a survey-based study that identified simplified displacement monitoring of railroad bridges under trains as the main research interest of railroad bridge structural engineers. The second part of this publication describes a railroad bridge classification towards structural health monitoring (SHM) applications, based on current structural engineering problems and challenges identified by the railroad industry for each railroad bridge type. Finally, this paper briefly describes ongoing research related to attempting to monitor railroad bridge deflections by means of using simplified wireless sensors, and preliminary field experimentation and proof of concept validations.