CIVIL ENGINEERING

Electronic Data Acquisition and Analysis in the Civil Engineering Environment

As countries develop, there is usually a greater demand for a new and more extensive infrastructure. This demand is further fuelled by increasing population sizes and a trend towards urbanization. In order for the support infrastructure to keep pace with (and facilitate) the development of countries or regions, many new construction and environmental modification projects are undertaken.

More people inhabiting limited space (and raising the population density as a result) leads to taller buildings, longer bridges and tunnels, wider roads that carry immense amounts of traffic, public transit railway systems consisting of many miles of track within a limited geographical area, large dams and reservoirs, and many other construction projects that require the boundaries of civil engineering to be constantly pushed.

This process often drives the development of new and better civil engineering and construction techniques, and also means that there must be a constant focus on safety – during the construction phase and as part of an ongoing maintenance and monitoring program.

The Link Between Data and Safety

As construction and infrastructure development projects get bigger and more advanced, it makes sense that monitoring equipment should contain up-to-date technology and be used to its fullest capability.

Although primarily known for their underground mining applications, the various types of geotechnical monitoring instruments available from Mine Design Technologies (MDT) can also be effectively used above ground, and are ideal for the monitoring of various types of civil engineering projects and installations; for example, bridges, tunnels, road systems, the tracks of urban public transit railway systems, and many others.

Sensors provided by MDT measure factors like displacement, convergence, ground movement and sloughing (caving).

The various sensors can be connected, in groups of three or four, to a series of wireless nodes (e.g. the MDT-RTU) that are positioned in such a way that they form a wireless mesh network. Data is then automatically collected and relayed from one wireless node to another until it reaches an Ethernet Gateway.

From this point, the data are relayed via a dedicated or existing LAN or cellular network to a central computer. Here, bespoke software is used by Engineers to analyze and interpret the data. This allows them to pinpoint potential problems before they become dangerous.