Dynamic Monitoring on Tsing Ma Bridge (Lantau Link)
Dewetron DEWE2-M7 Data Acquisition System
(DAS)
Tsing Ma Bridge
Tsing Ma Bridge has a span of 1,377 meters which makes it the longest
suspension bridge that is capable of carrying both road and rail traffic. It is
still one of the major links between the largest island, the Lautau Island, and
the urban area of Hong Kong which has been operating for 25 years.
While safety and stability are the utmost concerns of the bridge,
dynamic monitoring of the structure have been introduced. The spans of the
bridge is divided into 4 sections for monitoring purpose and in each section, a
DEWE2-M7 data acquisition system has been placed which is responsible for
measuring acceleration, wind speed, displacement, strain, temperature, etc.
The DEWE2-M7 Data Acquisition system
with built-in PC
Regarding monitoring of the Tsing Ma Bridge, ultrasonic wind sensors and displacement sensors are connected directly to the M7 DAS via Terminal Port RS-232/RS-485 while additionally, TRION 1802-dLV modules are being mounted to the M7 DAS to acquire analogue signal like accelerometer, strain gauges at a sampling rate of 100S/s. The modules supports 16 differential channels with a maximum sampling speed of 200kS/s. By further connecting the TRION-x-dLV-CB16-D9 expansion box to each TRION 1802, more than tens of sensors with various output including, voltage, current, bridge are being connected effortlessly.
Taking Measurements
The Data is then collected by the cutting-edge Dewetron’s OXYGEN software at a rate of 1GB/s. It is an All-in-one software for measurement, visualization, and analysis for many applications including input and output of data. For Tsing Ma Bridge, other than the strain gauges and accelerometers data collected by M7, hundreds of PT100 temperature sensors installed, output as serial format, are also recorded by OXYGEN via M7’s built-in serial-plugin. All data collected by M7 are then assembled and presented in a user-customized display. Afterwards, the data are exported as desired formats like *.txt, *.csv, *.xlsx, *.mat, .dat (DIADEM), etc.
Data Output as
different format