Ineco continues to commit to innovation applied to railway infrastructure and has participated in the development of the SMART-BRIDGES programme alongside the universities of Córdoba and Granada, with the support of Adif. This project represents a qualitative leap in the structural monitoring of high-speed bridges.
Thanks to SMART-BRIDGES, an SHM system (structural health monitoring) has been developed based on IoT technology, which combines acceleration sensors and environmental sensors that allow real-time evaluation of the state of the bridges. The system is composed of low-cost, high-efficiency nodes, which send data to a main node and this transfers them to the cloud for further analysis. More than 60 train passages are processed daily, and parameters such as vibration frequencies or damping are evaluated.
Additionally, SMART-BRIDGES reduces its environmental impact by being powered by solar panels, allowing its installation in remote locations. To test this system, two high-speed bridges with different characteristics have been monitored: the first, which already had a monitoring solution in production, allowed for comparison of evaluations. The second, without prior information, achieved a complete characterisation thanks to the latest advances in structural modelling and dynamic analysis.
SMART-BRIDGES provides benefits such as early detection of damage and fatigue, continuous assessment of structural condition, and optimisation of predictive maintenance.
In this way, Ineco strengthens its commitment to innovation, framing this project within the strategy that seeks to apply emerging technologies such as Big Data and Machine Learning to infrastructure maintenance in critical situations.
