• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.1-9
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• 2016

Railroad bridges account for 25% of the entire high-speed rail network. Railway bridges are subject to gradual structural degradation or fatigue accumulation due to consistent and repeating excitation by fast moving trains. Wireless sensing technology has opened up a new avenue for bridge health monitoring owing to its low-cost, high fidelity, and multiple sensing capability. On the other hand, measuring the transient response during train passage is quite challenging that the current wireless sensor system cannot be applied due to the intrinsic time delay of the sensor network. Therefore, this paper presents a framework for monitoring such transient responses with wireless sensing systems using 1) real-time excessive vibration monitoring through ultra-low-power MEMS accelerometers, and 2) post-event time synchronization scheme. The ultra-low power accelerometer continuously monitors the vibration and trigger network when excessive vibrations are detected. The entire network of wireless smart sensors starts sensing through triggering and the post-event time synchronization is conducted to compensate for the time error on the measured responses. The results of this study highlight the potential of detecting the impact load and triggering the entire network, as well as the effectiveness of the post-event time synchronized scheme for compensating for the time error. A numerical and experimental study was carried out to validate the proposed sensing hardware and time synchronization method.