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Tomorrow's Technology Today
Optical Sensing Solutions, IoT
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Portageville Bridge
About The Bridge
The Portageville Bridge is located at milepost 361.66 along the Southern Tier Route, Norfolk Southern’s mainline route between Buffalo and Binghamton, NY. The route crosses over the Genesee River in Letchworth State Park, located near the town of Portageville, NY. The bridge, constructed in 1875, is a steel viaduct that is 820 feet long that crosses some 250 feet above the Genesee River gorge.
Objective
ChM4's objective was to monitor the integrity and behavior of the bridge structure and the effects due to high rail traffic and heavy train loads that could cause possible damage and fatigue or collapse. Optical strain sensors with temp compensation was mounted on a large number of I-Bars in three zones to see how well they remained in tension when trains crossed. Should a I-Bar fracture or tension was severely lost a warning system would notify the dispatch control center to reroute trains to an alternative track to avoid a collapse. ChM4 approached the system with a redundant optical system setup due to the bridge being critical to Norfolk Southern carrying heavy freight trains from eastern port of entry in case of a system failure.
3D Model
Optical Sensor shown are on Near Side and duplicated on Far side of Bridge Map
Model of bridge built used for pre-assemble of sensor system and location approvals. The model also used in the cloud SQL user interface software IntelliOptics® on Norfolk Southern Virtual servers. For Optical map detail click here to see the installation full map of the optical system for the following sensors. (1) Luna Interrogator and 16 channel multiplexer, (100) os3155 strain sensors with on board temperature compensation, (10) os4350 temperature sensor for environmental purposes, and (1) os7500 accelerometer to know when train was approaching to save data at a faster rates automatically.
During the Train crossings ChM4 field crews were present when Norfolk Southern would schedule inspections our team was on site. On several of these inspections we would take video's of various sections of the bridge. During these visits we observed many I-Bars would go into compression where the design requires all I-Bars to be intention under load. From the video you can see these I-Bars bow this eventually resulted in this bridge being replaced due to these occurrences after several years of monitoring.
IntelliOptics® structural health monitoring software, developed by ChM4 is a powerful, user-friendly interface that collects data from multiple sensor types and displays status information via one centralized program. Also see our software section for more information and our Intelli-Insight® predictive analysis module for maintenance of critical structures.
ChM4 structural health monitoring installation of FBG optical sensors, control panels and software turnkey project.