A Living Lab for Structural Health Monitoring at the Nibelungen Bridge Worms for Transfer Learning of Structural Dynamics

Abstract

The Nibelungen Bridge in Worms, Germany has been selected as a national demonstration structure for advanced non-destructive testing (NDT) and structural health monitoring concepts to extend the lifetime of civil structures and to optimize O&M actions. Parts of the research that involves this bridge as a demonstrator belong to the focus area program SPP100+. In this program, the bridges SHM System has been extended and combined with an additional setup of vibration sensors. This living lab with seven triaxial accelerometers can be reconfigured in real-time and adjusted to the needs of AI models for classification. The comparison with the existing conventional SHM sensors has been made possible by hardware synchronization to the existing SHM System and collocating sensors at similar positions, so that a hardware exchange can be an investigated use-case for the transfer learning. The separation of a complete structure into substructures for training data generation, called 'transfer structures' has been introduced. This concept has been validated performing a modal analysis of the Nibelungen Bridge with the aquired monitoring data.