abstract = "The worldwide ageing of the infrastructure and the
development of new technologies in the construction
industry provided a need for structural health
monitoring (SHM). SHM provides a tool for owners and
researchers to assess the condition of a structure and
monitor its behaviour under real life conditions. Road
transport and the related infrastructures are clearly
an integral part of the economic, political, and social
development of the western world. As an example,
highway bridges as a major part of infrastructures can
be greatly damaged by excessively heavy vehicles or
severe environmental conditions. It is therefore,
important to assure that such facilities are well
maintained and function properly in order to avoid
major failures or the need for costly repairs. In
current thesis, it is attempted to innovate techniques
in order to measure the vehicles loads affecting the
bridge elements as well as damage detection methods to
monitor the defects along the in-service bridge
structural components. Bridge Weigh-in-Motion (BWIM) is
using an existing bridge to weigh trucks while they are
moving at full highway speeds. A new method of BWIM has
been established in order to weigh the passing trucks
relying on the shear strain measurements near the
bridge abutments which differs from the flexural strain
based traditional systems. The shear strain are
measured using the rosettes sensors installed on the
webs of bridge girders to directly measure the
individual axle weights of trucks passing over the
bridge abutments. Two concrete slab on steel girder
bridges, and a box girder prestressed concrete with
different structural types, span lengths, and different
sizes were instrumented for the performance
verification of the proposed BWIM system. A series of
truck runs were implemented in the field to calibrate
and evaluate the proposed BWIM system's efficiency. In
addition, current research formulated a reference-free
distributed damage detection method in order to locate
the defects that occur in structures under in-service
operating conditions. The sensing method is developed
on the basis of Brillouin scattering phenomena. It
employs the dynamic distributed strain measurement data
in order to sense the structural perturbations under
in-service operations, i.e. bridges subjected to
traffic loadings, or aircrafts during flights. The
advantage of the method developed in this study is that
it enables the structure to be monitored at any stage
during its service life without the need for prior
reference data. An experimental program was designed to
investigate the feasibility of the proposed approach in
detecting the locations of very small defects.
Laboratory experiments were designed in order to
simulate the effect of ambient conditions in bridges,
especially in terms of realistic displacements, i.e.
deflections occurring in highway bridges. In a
following effort, a theoretical model was also
investigated to analysis the strain transfer mechanism
from the structure surface to the distributed optical
fibre components in the presence of local defects. The
main objective pertained to the accurate quantification
of local defects sizes based on distributed monitoring
of strains in large structural systems. The theoretical
formulation simulated the strain distribution within
the components of an optical fiber crossing over a
single crack opening. The proposed model was formulated
in a manner to quantify defects in the presence of
structural vibration. Both linear and nonlinear
mechanical characteristics of optical fibre components
were also assumed in the formulation. The spatial
resolution effect was further numerically implemented
within the formulation in order to simulate the
measurement configurations. An experimental program was
designed for calibration as well as the validation of
theoretical formulation. The experiments involved
dynamic tests of a 15 meter long steel I beam with two
fabricated defects with small opening displacements
ranging between 50 and 550 microns.",