Description:
EngAnalysis is monitoring the stresses on 3 critical steel gantry structures over a rail line in Victoria.
Our client wants to manage their risk on this structure by quantifying and monitoring the bending stresses that could cause fatigue damage of the weld between the column and base plate.
The installation includes 3x full bridge strain gauges, 600mm above the critical weld, providing temperature compensated bending and torsional stress. Data is logged and transmitted through an LTE modem to the EngAnalysis data center in Newcastle where it is processed and transmitted to a real-time portal.
The hardware setup was customized by the EngAnalysis team to suit the monitoring requirements for the structure. The system logs high frequency data and our analysis package processes the data and transforms the peak readings into 20 minute segments where it is available on our near real time visualization portal.
The portal allows our client to log in and access a near real and time history analysis of the structural stresses and also provides automatic alerting if stresses exceed a defined threshold. EngAnalysis also provide a monthly report, which includes further data analysis and predictive forecasting, taking into account the number of cycles within various stress ranges.
Our analysis also incorporates local weather by correlating peak stresses with measured wind speed. This methodology has given verification to the stresses we see and allowed us to identify and omit erroneous data, such as a period when some maintenance upgrades were being performed on the structure.
Through ongoing and real time monitoring, the project has enabled our client to mitigate their “risk of the unknown” by providing key risk indicators (stress amplitude) for the monitored structures, as well as providing a contextual data set that may be used for understanding their broader risk of similar structures across the network.