Abstract Manager

As highway infrastructure ages and degrades, the ratio of traffic demand to capacity is increasing, making oversize and overweight vehicles a common concern worldwide. Overweight vehicles can cause significant damage to bridge structures, accelerating degradation, shortening service life, and can ultimately lead to collapse in some instances. This has resulted in a growing interest in the development of technologies and systems which can monitor the frequency and characteristics of overweight loading events and the effect they have on bridge structures. Bridge Weigh in Motion (B-WIM) systems use the deformation of a bridge, under live loading, to estimate the characteristics of passing traffic loads. An existing bridge is instrumented with a series of sensors which uses the full bridge as a weighing mechanism. The implementation of such a system is discussed through a full-scale case study arterial highway bridge in the province of New Brunswick, Canada. Operational data is presented and loading trends as well as key findings are discussed.