Long-term vibration monitoring on railway bridge KW51 in Leuven, Belgium

Railway bridge KW51 in Leuven, Belgium, has been continuously monitored since October 2018.During the monitoring, the bridge was retrofitted to resolve a construction error that was noticedduring inspection. The aim of the measurements is twofold. First, the strain measurements on thebridge deck are used to validate virtual strain sensing, which can be embedded in continuous fatiguemonitoring to assess the stress cycles under train loading in critical details which are not measured.Second, it is investigated to what extent continuous monitoring of the modal characteristics of thebridge enables detecting changes in the structure that could potentially be attributed to damage. Inthis case, the retrofitting results in an actual state transition, which, as shown, can be identifiedfrom the natural frequency data. This paper summarizes the first results of the measurementcampaign.

Publication year:2021