Urban Highway Bridge Structure Health Assessments Using

Wireless Sensor Network

Frank X. Li, AKM Anwarul Islam*, Amer S. Jaroo*, Hiwa Hamid*, Jalal Jalali, Michael Sammartino

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of Civil & Environmental

Engineering*, Youngstown State University, OH, 44555, USA

Abstract — This paper presents a wireless sensor network
for assessing the structural health of urban highway bridges.
Sensor data were collected on two pre-stressed box beam
bridges (PSBB) with eight wireless sensor nodes. The wireless
sensor was able to collect one hundred Accelerometer data
samples per second without losing any wireless sensor data.
Application software was developed to transform the sample
data into frequency domain. Sensor data from all eight wireless
sensor nodes have shown the similar peak frequencies with
multiple trial runs on the same bridge. The peak frequency
component was unique to each highway bridge. The signal to
noise ratio in frequency domain is greater than seven to one. By
comparing the actual wireless sensor data with the predictions
from a finite element bridge model, a hypothesis of evaluating
the structural health of the bridge was presented.
Index Terms — Wireless mesh networks, sensor networks,
frequency domain, structural health.
I. INTRODUCTION
In this study, a portable wireless sensor network was built
and real-time sensor data were collected with known load
conditions on urban highway bridges. The goal is to collect
wireless sensor data under different vehicle weights and
speeds on urban highway bridges in real time and use the
sensor data for statistical analysis of the bridge structural
health. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation
(USDOT), 66,749 (11%) bridges were categorized as
structurally deficient, and 84,748 (13.9%) were categorized
as functionally obsolete [1]. There are very few direct
assessments of the overall bridge structure health, other
than visual inspections. Therefore, it is essential to develop
accessible, low cost, and non-destructive means to assess
the structural health of the bridge and predict the remaining
life span of a highway bridge.
The latest wireless communication and embedded system
technology have made a low-cost, fast, and portable
wireless sensor network possible for structural health sensor
data collections. Many other researchers have deployed
wireless sensor network for similar purposes. Straser and
Kiremidjian first proposed the integration of wireless
communication technology with sensors to reduce the cost Fig. 1. The connection diagram of the wireless mesh network shows
of structural monitoring systems [2]. For highway bridge
health assessment, the most used sensor data is the strain
sensor. However, classic strain measurement equipment is
bulky and power demanding. Additionally, the standard
strain sensor bridge can only produce 20 mV with external
5V excitation. At such low signal strength, the accuracy of
the sensor measurements becomes questionable.
Additionally, the installation and maintenance costs of these
strain gauges are high. The wireless sensor node uses a
lithium-ion battery with the interface voltage level of 3V.
The Accelerometer has an integrated Analog to digital
converter and the signal voltage is ±1.5 V, which
significantly suppressed the system noise level.
The diagram of the wireless sensor network is shown in
Fig. 1. The base station connects to multiple wireless sensor
nodes and exchange data from them. Each wireless node
broadcasted its own sensor data through single or multiple
hops. The server computer connected to the base station
through a USB serial cable, which collects the data
simultaneously through multiple threads. This type of
configurations guaranteed each wireless node may have
more than one path to the centralized server. Many other
researches have used the concept of wireless sensor network
and collected accelerometer sensor data [3-4].
Sensor Sensor
node #3 node #4
Listener #4
Listener #3
Base
Station
Listener #1
Listener #2
Sensor Sensor
node #2 node #1
that each individual node has different listener threads.

978-1-4799-5519-0/15/$31.00 © 2015 IEEE 75 WiSNet 2015

 II. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND guarantee the accuracy of the sensor data, the traffic on the
A bridge is rated as structurally deficient when part of the
bridge is found to be in poor condition. The vibration of a
deficient bridge under different load conditions may
experience different vibration frequency due to the
degradation of bridge materials, such as concrete and steel.
The changes of the vibration frequency for the aging bridge
could be an important structural health indicator.
A. Peer-to-peer Wireless Network
In this study, the wireless communication network is a
typical peer-to-peer network. The communication between
the wireless radio nodes is relayed through other wireless
nodes in a Peer-to-Peer communication style using a mesh
topology [5-6]. All listener threads receiving the data will
continue to forward the data to their neighbors. The base
station is a special peer node, which transmits received
Fig. 2. The field photo of the wireless sensor network setup with
wireless sensor data to a computer. eight wireless sensor nodes on a highway bridge
B. Wireless sensor nodes

The wireless sensor nodes are Java based small

programmable wireless sensor network (WSN), developed
by Sun Microsystems, currently owned by Oracle. The
embedded software creates a radio packet with multiple
accelerometer sensor data. Since the sensor is mounted on
the deck of the bridge, only acceleration data in the vertical
direction was collected. The sensor data was normalized to
the earth gravity g.

C. Dynamic structural response

Dynamic structural response of a structure can be
expressed by Eq. 1,
m x(t )  c x(t )  k x(t )  F (t ) (1)
Fig. 3. Time domain sensor data for sensor node #4 with 100 Hz
sampling frequency
Where, x(t ) = displacement of structure, m = mass of
structure, c = damping of structure, k = stiffness of structure,
and F(t) = time-dependent force on structure. The natural
circular frequency of the structure can be expressed by Eq. 2
as follows:
  k /m (2)

III. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP AND RESULTS

The wireless sensor nodes were mounted on a 25 year

bridge section close to the centerline of the bridge. As
shown in Fig. 2, the wireless sensor nodes were placed two
meters apart. The RF signal levels are well above the
minimum required level. The sensor data were collected
when a known weight truck drove by at different speeds. To Fig. 4. FFT Amplitude plot of the sensor data collected from
sensor node #4

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bridge was stopped. VII. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE PLANS
The data collected from the embedded accelerometer on
A portable wireless sensor network for assessing
the z-axial of the wireless sensor node is shown in Fig. 3.
structural health of a bridge is presented. By comparing the
The application software transformed the 1024 sensor data
actual sensor data with the simulation results, the vibration
points from each sensor node to frequency domain. The
frequency reduction is about 37% for the 25-year old bridge.
amplitude vs. frequency plot is shown in Fig. 4. The peak
For another 5-year old bridge, the frequency reduction is
frequencies are shown in the following table.
much less. The hypothesis is that the reduction of bridge
vibration frequency is an essential indicator of the overall
TABLE I
SENSOR DATA FOR DIFFERENT TRUCK SPEEDS
structural health of the bridge. In the future, a database
might be created to monitor the frequency reductions of the
Accelerometer Peak frequencies (Hz)
bridge during the life of the bridge. Also, future high
Truck Speed (miles per hour)
sensitivity sensors and high sample frequencies will allow
Sensor
possible detections in higher order resonance frequencies on
Node 10 mph 15 mph 20 mph 25 mph
the bridge.
#1 3.42 3.52 3.52 3.42
#2 3.42 3.42 3.52 3.42
#3 3.73 3.42 3.22 3.42 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
#4 3.42 3.52 3.32 3.52 This research is made possible by the Ohio Department of
#5 3.22 3.42 3.32 3.52 Transportation. Additionally, supports were received from
#6 3.13 3.52 3.42 3.42 Center for Transportation and Materials Engineering of
#7 3.13 3.42 3.13 3.52 Youngstown State University.
#8 3.61 3.52 3.22 3.52
REFERENCES
IV. FINITE ELEMENT MODEL OF THE BRIDGE
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