“STRUCTURAL HEALTH MONITORING OF RAILWAY BRIDGE

Abstract

The railway bridges experiences huge weight and volume of train traffic each day multiple times, deterioration of different elements and a large number of stress cycles throughout its life cycle. Most commonly used approaches for structural health monitoring of railway bridges are visual inspection and non- destructive methods. The method related to visual inspection are quite cheap but their accuracy depends on person to person and at the experience of the person conduction the inspection. On the other hand, the non-destructive testing is quite accurate and their result is nearly same but the cost related to the conduction non destructive tests are expensive so cannot be afforded easily. Therefore, the researches have used the method which are based on the dynamic properties of the structure ex- Vibration based structural health monitoring. These methods are economical, provide more realistic prediction of the characteristics and damage of the bridge. When we talk about the railway's bridges, we should really consider the amount of the load which freight and a passenger train carry, and that load has been carried by the bridge thousands of times in its lifespan as a result of which there is a need of continuous maintenance of the bridge for which a number of high labors is required. And if we consider a nation like INDIA, having a total railway network of 1,23,236 km, with 13,452 passenger trains and 9,141 freight trains plying 23 million travellers and 3 million tonnes (MT) of freight daily from 7,349 stations, which is one of the largest in the world through one of the most difficult terrains from cold regions of the north to regularly getting affected regions due to cyclones of south India, from one of the driest place of Rajasthan ( west India) to one of the most humid north-east regions of India, having thousands of railway bridges across its network working 24*7 across the whole year, it's become quite a tough job to maintain railway bridges to assure its reliability.