Structural Monitoring – An inherent part of earthquake engineering sciences

Structural monitoring is popularly known as the intrinsic part of earthquake engineering sciences. The seismology division of sciences is involved into finding seismic and seismo-tectonic activity information. Engineering seismology transforms this information and procures both general and specific codes used by structural engineers in the design process. Because of the proportionate randomness of earthquake phenomenon, earth quake supplies extra information for a particular region or brings limelight to new seismic faults.
With the ongoing changes in the global climatic conditions, more and more earthquakes are shocking the earth on a regular basis. To procure more information on this changed behavior, the structural monitoring aims at defining, recommending and executing effective measures against the possible adverse effects of earthquakes.

The main problem relies not only in economic losses but claiming human lives. In order to put an end to this loss, it is very much imperative for us to bring into account effective structural monitoring measures at sensitive places. To protect life and assist in stopping economic losses is what makes engineers to fully master structural analysis methods and models so that the actual behavior of the structure coincide as nearly as possible with the phenomena they expect.
The most basic task of structural monitoring is to come out with a dynamic model that can be employed in the design process. It validates or improves seismic design codes. In case of earthquake, it analyzes the actual response. It supplies information used in post-earthquake actions. Structural monitoring process typically links with pre-installed automatic shutdown mechanism to bring down the damage.

Another important task of structural monitoring is to protect the environment against high-risk spillage. Actually it provides relevant data to the retrofit process. It reduces the monitored structure’s post-earthquake non-operational downtime. These are generally two system architectures for structural monitoring with GPS, one based on a fixed network of sensors and the other based on mobile sensors. Most traditional bridge monitoring systems rely on a fixed network of sensors that transmit their data back to a central site for processing and analysis. This is also a helpful architecture for GPS-based systems. . For measuring long-term movement _ such as foundation settlement, creep, stress relaxation, and others _ the sensor nodes are mounted over the bridge piers. For measuring shorter term motion, such as that caused by wind or traffic loading, the sensors are mounted between piers.