Structural health monitoring based on static measurements with temperature compensation

The paper presents the main results from static tests in a prestressed concrete beam taken out from a real bridge. The tests were achieved during about one month with several scenarios of damage that loaded and unloaded states were monitored for each scenario. Damages in 4 levels were simulated by cutting prestressed tendons. There were 8 transducers distributed along the length’s beam to measure displacements.
Deflection lines resulted from the static measurements from every state allow discovering the location of damages. Moreover, the calculation of slope and curvature lines leads also to very interesting issues for damage localization.