Autonomous Wireless Monitoring and Assessment of Railroad Bridges: Railroads are one of the most critical components of the U.S. transportation system, accommodating transportation for 48% of the nation’s total modal tonnage. Despite such vital importance, more than half of railroad bridges, an essential component of railroad infrastructure in maintaining the flow of the network, were built before 1920; as a result, bridges comprise one of the most fragile components of the railroad system. Current structural inspection practices do not ensure sufficient information for both short- and long-term condition assessment while keeping the operational costs sufficiently low for mandatory annual inspection. In this talk, we present the development of an autonomous, affordable system for monitoring railroad bridges using the wireless smart sensors. A complete end-to-end wireless monitoring solution can provide relevant information directly from the bridges to the end-users at a fraction of the cost of traditional monitoring solutions. The system’s main contribution is to capture the train-crossing events efficiently and eliminate the need for a human-in-the-loop for remote data retrieval and post-processing. In the proposed system, an adaptive strategy combining an event-based and schedule-based framework is implemented. The wireless system addresses the challenges of continuous condition monitoring by completing the wireless data pipeline from smart sensors with edge computing capabilities to a scalable, cloud-based data management and visualization solution. To demonstrate the efficacy of this system, we present the results of a full-scale monitoring campaign on railroad bridges. By overcoming the challenges of monitoring railroad bridges wirelessly and autonomously, this system is expected to become an essential tool for bridge engineers and decision-makers.
