A year ago we tested a 20 m long complete railway bridge span at the ICITECH laboratories together with one of its cross girders. The idea was to estimate the bridge’s risk of fatigue failure and its degree of robustness to possible local failures. This experimental work was the starting point for monitoring the Quisi Bridge in Benissa (Alicante).
For the last few months Building Resilient and Calsens have been working on defining and installing the monitoring equipment on the Quisi Bridge. The monitoring consists of more than 200 optic deformation/strain sensors, 8 fibre optic LVDTs, 30 accelerometers and more than 10 km of cables. The data acquired by the sensors is sent in real time to a server connected to different software that carries out the first analysis for generating warnings and alerts to activate safety protocols in case of emergency.
The monitoring plan was recently validated by the loading tests carried out, which included: 6 static loading tests (1 per span), 2 dynamic loading tests (1 in each direction) and 2 braking loading tests (1 in each direction).
