Monitoring the structural response of reinforced concrete poles along high-speed railway tracks

Abstract

With the ongoing expansion of railway systems in Europe, spun-cast reinforced concrete poles have become one of the most prevalent civil engineering structures. In this study, three spun-cast reinforced concrete poles along a new high-speed railway track in Germany have been instrumented with a structural monitoring system to capture the structural behavior of the poles, with particular focus on the structural response to trains passing. To remotely access the monitoring data, a data management framework has been designed. Data integration, data transformation, and data storage are executed by the data management framework, largely autonomously. As will be shown in this paper, the data management framework also supports statistical analyses, which have been used to study the effects of trains passing on the structural behavior of the poles. As a result, correlations of acceleration/strain measurements and the speed of passing trains as well as factors that influence the measurements during trains passing could be determined.