Vibration-Based Bridge Health Monitoring using Telecommunication Cables

Abstract: Bridge Health Monitoring (BHM) enables early damage detection of bridges and is thus critical for avoiding more severe damages that might result in major financial and human losses. However, conventional BHM systems require dedicated sensors on bridges, which is costly to install and maintain and hard to scale up. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a new system that uses existing telecommunication cables for Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) to collect bridge dynamic strain responses. In addition, we develop a two-module physics-guided system identification method to extract bridge damage-sensitive information (e.g., natural frequencies and mode shapes) from noisy DAS data by constraining strain and displacement mode shapes by bridge dynamics. This approach does not require installation and maintenance of dedicated sensors on bridges. We evaluate our system with field experiments on a concrete bridge with fiber cable running in a conduit under the deck. Our system successfully identified modal frequencies and reconstructed meter-scale mode shapes.