SMARTE – Development and implementation of a long term structural health monitoring

The accompanying of civil infrastructures behavior during their whole life cycle is growing within the last few years. This fact is due to several problems detected in such structures, which is the main reason for the dispended budget by owners in their maintenance, being even higher than other costs. In another way, traditional surveillance techniques, although important are expensive, slow in time and subjective. Considering such panorama, within a national research project SMARTE project a new technique for management and maintenance of structures was developed and implemented in a real structure, a pre-stressed concrete bridge (Sorraia River Bridge). The developed technique, long term structural health monitoring, has as a final purpose the execution of structural maintenance in an objective and efficient way. The evaluation of the structural behavior during whole life cycle is performed in an “on line” continuous way, allowing the on time detection of existent damages. highways A1 (between Aveiras de Cima and Condeixa) and A2 (between Palmela and the highway A22) and to the new highways A3, A4, A5, A6, A9 and A10 (Perdigão et al. 2004). SMARTE project, which consist in the development and implementation of a system for monitoring and remote management of civil infrastructures, allow the acquisition of real time information with the possibility of visualizing graphics and schemes where the establishment of limit security values for the different measured parameters will permit the alarm generation always when fixed levels are reached, is considered as one more value for the actual civil infrastructures management program of BRISA (GOA).