Moving Toward a State of Good Repair: Remote Structural Integrity Monitoring

Keeping aging transportation infrastructure, such as bridges, in a state of good repair with limited resources is a nationwide challenge. One way to get the most value per dollar is to apply technologies that deliver objective information on the condition of transportation assets that can then be used to set maintenance and rehabilitation priorities. Northwestern University's Infrastructure Technology Institute (NU-ITI) is developing tools and methods for collecting and analyzing data to not only learn how specific infrastructure systems are performing but to build capabilities that can predict system performance over time as well. As a part of its research program, the NU-ITI team has developed a remote structural health monitoring system for in-service bridges and deployed this system on a century-old Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) mainline bridge.