Railway bridge monitoring system using inertial sensors

The paper presents a railway bridges monitoring system. The system is focused on monitoring of new and old steel bridges. The system is using inertial sensors: inclinometers and accelerometers. These transducers do not require any referential points. The elaboration of the method which uses inclinometers together with an accelerometer for indirect displacement measurement under the dynamic load is the main achievement of the system. Inclinometers are installed in one line on a span and accelerometer at the point of displacement examination. During the passage of a train all the signals from the inclinometers and accelerometer are registered by a central unit and then sent to a server via Internet. A special software platform was developed to test various algorithms of processing the signals registered by the monitored structures during train passages. The system presented herein was checked on arch bridge with span length of 75 m.