IIT Kanpur develops wireless sensor to monitor railway bridges

Bangalore, Jan 23 (UNI) The strength of ageing bridges across the vast railway network need not be of any concern as two students of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, have developed a wireless sensor network based railway bridge monitoring system to test the strength of bridges.

Called BriMon, the system could be used by Railways to measure the strength of the bridge and take timely action to strengthen the bridges and avert accidents due to bridge collapses.

Raj Kumar and Phani Kumar Valiveti of the Department of Electrical Engineering, in a paper presented at TechVista 2007 organised by Microsoft Research here today, said the prototype BriMon was based on a wireless sensor network system, which made use of sensor notes and MEMS accelerometers for monitoring the strength of a bridge.

There were about 1,20,000 railway bridges, of which 57 per cent were over 80-years-old and it was critical to have a system to monitor the structural health of these bridges, the students said.

BriMon was an user-friendly data analysis tool for onsite data analysis. Besides short term monitoring, BriMon could also be augmented for long term monitoring which involved detection mechanism to trigger data collection in response to an oncoming train.

According to the abstract made available to the media, BriMon had been tested and found effective. The system also employed a multi-channel data transfer mechanism to transfer the collected data into a sink located on the moving train using a radio.

The architecture for long term monitoring was designed after careful consideration of the interaction between the multiple requisite functionalities such as time synchronisation, event detection, routing and data transfer.

UNI