Design Issues and Experiences with BRIMON Railway BRIdge MONitoring Project

ABSTRACT Structural health monitoring of railway bridges is an essential but currently expensive proposition. Current systems employing data loggers and analyzers are both labour intensive for setup and require trained manpower for deployment and usage. In this work we propose a system design for remote, on-demand railway bridge monitoring system which is easier to deploy and autonomous in its operation. The system is low cost, as o the shelf equipments are used and expensive sensing equipments are replaced with Micro Electronic Mechanical Systems (MEMS) based sensors and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) replacing the cabling and data logging system for data transportation and collection. Current structural health monitoring systems are