Continuous monitoring of the Oresund Bridge: system and data analysis

The Oresund Bridge opened in July 2000. It is the most striking part of the fixed link across the Oresund connecting Copenhagen (Denmark) and Malmo (Sweden), which further includes a tunnel and an artificial island. The bridge is equipped with a PC-based continuous monitoring system, capable of measuring both static and dynamic quantities such as temperatures, wind characteristics, air humidity, strains and accelerations. The challenges for the design of the monitoring system were the long distances between the monitoring points and the variety of sensors. This paper describes the bridge and the monitoring system components. Some typical measurement data are presented. Finally, the modal parameters of the bridge are extracted from the deck, cable and tower vibrations. This shows that the system does not only give information about sudden events that exceed a certain threshold, but can also be used as a health monitoring system by tracking the evolution of the modal parameters.