As an important transportation facility in the city, urban bridges are the link and lifeline of urban transportation. Therefore, for some bridges that are frequently used every day, the safety of the bridge itself must be monitored in real time.

On October 10, 2019, a bridge deck rollover accident occurred at K135 and Wuxi Road of Wuxi National Highway 312, causing three deaths and two injuries. After preliminary analysis, the cause of the accident may be caused by overloading of the truck. After the accident, everyone is actively discussing the causes of the accident and effective solutions. After all, urban transportation is related to the daily commuting and travel safety of each of us.

As an important part of road traffic construction, the safety of bridges has attracted more and more attention. Due to the construction difficulty, poor environment and some human factors in the construction process, the bridge is safely exposed to various loads during the service process, the fatigue and corrosion of the material, and the destruction of natural factors. Certain hidden dangers. The damage caused by bridge damage cannot be estimated, so bridge safety monitoring is extremely important.

The traditional bridge safety monitoring is mainly based on manual inspection, and is supplemented by corresponding testing equipment. However, it is difficult to monitor the bridge in real time and continuously, and the monitoring method is not intelligent enough.

With the continuous development of the Internet of Things and smart cities, the health and safety monitoring of bridges and the maintenance of important structural parts are inseparable from the application of sensors.

The development and application of some reliable, accurate and inexpensive new sensors (such as pressure sensors, displacement measuring sensors, strain measuring sensors, vibration measuring sensors, etc.) have strongly promoted the development of bridge health and safety monitoring.

For example, in the urban bridge management of Wuhan City, Hubei Province, more than 1,000 sensors are always healthy for more than 30 bridges. According to experts, various types of sensors and acquisition equipment are installed on the bridge. Just like the hospital puts a 24-hour monitor on the patient, these sensors and acquisition equipment will real-time monitor the structural status of the bridge, foundation settlement, vehicle monitoring and other monitoring data. Through the Internet, it is stored in the cloud computing data center server to realize the all-weather automatic monitoring of the bridge.

In addition to Wuhan, Hubei, Anhui Hefei also constructed an urban bridge safety monitoring system. 387 sensors help the bustling avenue across the main span of the Nanfei River Bridge and the Jinzhai Road viaduct, and monitor the cable force, strain, dip, displacement, deflection, and Acceleration, structural temperature, etc.

According to relevant statistics, at present, 200 to 300 bridges in China have adopted sensors to enhance the monitoring of bridge health, ranging from one million yuan to ten million yuan. According to industry insiders, the maintenance of infrastructure such as bridges in China will be a large market with hundreds of billions of yuan each year.

This time, the Wuxi bridge overturning incident has sounded the alarm for the national bridge safety protection. While strengthening the supervision of passing vehicles, relevant departments should also fully realize the necessity of information management of bridge operation and maintenance management, and more use modern Internet of Things. Sensor technology monitors bridge health to ensure bridge safety.