Simple Smart Piezoelectric Bolt Sensor for Structural Monitoring of Bridges

Ageing and heavy traffic affect the structural condition of bridges and evaluation of their structural integrity is an important task to ensure their safety utilization. Structural health monitoring constitutes a method for continuous evaluation of the condition of a target construction and for this purpose many sensors and systems have been developed. In this research a simple smart piezoelectric sensor was develop and description of the proposed system, basic experiments to estimate the properties of the sensor and preliminary application to evaluate the dynamic characteristics of a target bridge are discussed. The applicability of this new sensor to estimate appropriately the structural condition of bridges was verified by comparing the measurements results with those obtained by means of more sophisticated sensors.