Distortion-induced fatigue cracks caused by differential deflections between adjacent girders are common issues for steel girder bridges built prior to the mid-1980s in the United States. Monitoring these fatigue cracks is essential to ensure bridge structural integrity. Despite various level of success of crack monitoring methods over the past decades, monitoring distortion-induced fatigue cracks is still challenging due to the complex structural joint layout and unpredictable crack propagation paths. Previously, the authors proposed soft elastomeric capacitor (SEC), a large-size flexible capacitive strain sensor, for monitoring in-plane fatigue cracks. The crack growth can be robustly identified by extracting the crack growth index (CGI) from the measured capacitance signals. In this study, the SECs are investigated for monitoring distortion-induced fatigue cracks. A dense array of SECs is proposed to monitor a large structural surface with fatigue-susceptible details. The effectiveness of this strategy has been verified through a fatigue test of a large-scale bridge girder to cross-frame connection model. By extracting CGIs from the SEC arrays, distortion-induced fatigue crack growth can be successfully monitored.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/simon_laflamme/88/
This proceeding is published as Xiangxiong Kong, Jian Li, William Collins, Caroline Bennett, Hongki Jo, Jong-Hyun Jeong, Simon Laflamme, "Dense capacitive sensor array for monitoring distortion-induced fatigue cracks in steel bridges," Proc. SPIE 10598, Sensors and Smart Structures Technologies for Civil, Mechanical, and Aerospace Systems 2018, 105980Q (27 March 2018); doi: 10.1117/12.2296592. Posted with permission.