Acoustic Wave (Acoustic Emission)
BRIDGE CABLE WIRE BREAKS MONITORING SYSTEM

Background:

Bridges are one of the integral and important part of the road system and are of strategic importance in the transportation industry. Suspension bridges, cable-stayed bridges and tied arch bridges whose main supports are cables, are also faced with the risk of fatigue or even breakages of cable wires during the long-term service and environmental corrosion. So ensuring the safe condition of bridges is of great concern. Periodical shutdowns for the regular bridge detection is not a good choice because of the heavy traffic and huge economic effects.

Therefore a system that can carry out long-term in-service bridge structural monitoring has great advantages. The bridge structural monitoring includes wire breaks of bridge cable monitoring, steel box girder crack monitoring, concrete bridge cracks monitoring etc. Some experimental investigations and national standards show that acoustic emission (acoustic waves) is the recommended technology to detect and monitor bridge cable wire breaks in real-time. It not only can carry out the sensitive and accurate long-term monitoring, but also is a non-intrusive and easy installation method.

Monitor System

RAEM1 acoustic emission monitoring system is the latest IoT-AE product which can accurately monitor the breaking signals of the bridge cable wires, calculate the wire break rate, and trigger the alarm to the operator when the wire break threshold is exceeded. Therefore the predictive maintenance can be planed according to the real-time monitoring results from the RAEM1 system to ensure the safe service of the bridge and to reduce the massive costs of periodic maintenance.

Note: the communication can be customized with 4G, WiFi, LoRa, NB-IoT, Bluetooth, RS485, Ethernet, etc.

Data Display & Analysis

Full size bridge cable rope wire breakage experiment:

A successful acoustic wave (acoustic emission) monitoring experiment on a full-size bridge cable steel rope was conducted by a joint team from QingCheng and a bridge cable manufacturer.

Diagram of full size bridge cable rope wire breakage experiment
(P1 is the wire break position, S is RAEM1 monitor position)

*Note: it conforms to the standard JT/T1037-2022 “Technical Specifications for Highway Bridge Structure Monitoring” and refers to “Over Limit Level” in Table 9.

• Level 2: when the wire break happens;
• Level 3:the rate of wire breaks > 2%

Real-time display of the number and rate of wire breaks

Alarm notification through e-mail or SMS

Video

Users Cases

Cases Study