First Smart Bridge in Canada

On November 5, 1993, the City of Calgary completed the construction of the first smart prestressed concrete highway bridge built in Canada. A total of six pretensioned girders of a continuous two span skew highway bridge were prestressed using carbon fibre composite cables (CrCC) developed by Tokyo Rope, and Leadline rods produced by Mitsubishi Kasei, Japan. This paper describes the construction details used to adopt these new materials into Canadian practices, and an optical fibre sensing system used to monitor the behaviour of the bridge, in addition to conventional electric resistance strain gauges. The paper also discusses the experimental program conducted at the University of Manitoba, Canada to test a 1 :3.3 model of the bridge girders prestressed by crcc and Leadline rods and monitored by the same optical fibre system.