Structural Health Monitoring: An End User's Point of View

The Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) concept has been developed in the early 1990s to improve the monitoring and safety of civil works and aeronautical structures. SHM consists more precisely to define a periodical and/or continuous monitoring strategy for all the life of such structures (old or not). A period of 15-20 years of worldwide SHM use has proven that this concept is today mature. The EDF group is one of the world's largest electricity producers, with a solid position in Europe and industrial operations in Asia and the United States. The civil engineering patrimony is composed in part of 58 nuclear PWRs in France (pressurized water reactors) of an average age of about 22 years, 447 hydroelectric power plants and 32 generation units of fossile-fired energy. Heavily involved in managing its power plants, EDF set up its own civil engineering works monitoring policy to perform the best monitoring of its civil works. EDF is continuously attempting to improve its method and means of monitoring its works and equipment as part of its approach as the responsible operator. So EDF R&D decided to evaluate the SHM methodology and to compare it to its own methodology and to its operating experience. This article aims to : - expose the results of a large bibliographic study on the SHM monitoring methodology, - give the EDF R&D point of view on the SHM methodology as operator, - give an EDF application of the SHM concept : optical fiber application for monitoring of dams [1].