Design of a bridge vibration monitoring system (BVMS)

The average age of the 607,380 bridges in the U.S. is 42 years old. All bridges are required to be inspected every two years, and the frequency of these inspections increases as they age. The current bi-annual cost to inspect all bridges is $2.7 billion and each bridge requires 1-3 days for on-site inspection, depending on the complexity of the bridge. The longer it takes to identify a deficiency; the more stress that is exerted on other components of the bridge, resulting in a domino effect creating more defects. According to the Federal Highway Administration´s 2009 statistics, $70.9 billion is needed to address the current backlog of deficient bridges. Advances in technology provide an opportunity to reduce the cost by 23.7%-26.9%, and improve the quality of bridge inspections by migrating from a periodic manual bridge inspection paradigm (e.g. once every 2 years or less) to an event-based inspection (e.g. inspect only when needed).