Assessment of the dynamic behavior of the railway bridge over the Sado River based on a monitoring system

This paper aims at presenting the on-line monitoring system installed at the bowstring bridge over the Sado River. The future goal is applying vibration-based damage-identification methodologies capable of automatically extracting meaningful information related to the railway bridges' condition, from the great amounts of SHM data acquired from monitored structures. In order to identify damage based on the bridge responses during the train passage, several sensors, such as accelerometers, displacement transducers, strain gauges and thermometers, are installed at Alcacer do Sal bridge. The long-term information obtained will allow validate the methodology developed with a real case study. In this work the on-line SHM system is presented as well as the main responses already measured, which allowed the Alfa Pendular train identification and the study of the bearings behaviour.