BRIDGEMON · Bridge Safety Monitoring

Much of the world’s bridges are old and need to be periodically repaired or replaced. However, premature replacement wastes money and non-renewable resources. BridgeMon is led by three SMEs who are working to extend the lives of existing bridges. They will develop bridge monitoring technologies to prove they are safe and can be kept in service for longer, thus ensuring more sustainable road asset management.A bridge is safe when the stresses due to traffic load are less than its resistance to that load. Bridge monitoring is gathering information about both sides of this inequality, traffic load and bridge resistance and the BridgeMon SEMs cover both. It is led by Cestel, a world leader in Bridge Weigh-in-Motion (WIM). Cestel have partnered with two SMEs that specialise in monitoring the resistance of bridges to load, one for the road sector and one for the railway sector.The novel theory of Moving Force Identification (MFI) will be applied in bridge WIM system to increase accuracy considerably and extend it to other types of bridge. An advance on MFI will be used to extend WIM to railway bridges and to gain additional information on the resistance of bridges to load. MFI and other improvements will increase the accuracy of the truck weight data to Class A, i.e., to the point where 95% of results have errors of less than 5%, a level not available today with any WIM technology.In the area of structural health monitoring BridgMon will develop and implement tools for improved bridges assessment, including modules to evaluate fatigue life of steel bridges and structural health of railway bridges, both combined with Bridge WIM (traffic loading).The new technologies, coupled with partnership arrangements with Cestel, will give the other SMEs Unique Selling Points in the bridge resistance monitoring markets. The result gives a potential for massive growth in these SMEs in the coming 5 years, in both turnover and employment.