Structural health monitoring and FE modelling of the Suramadu Bridge in Indonesia

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has received significant public attention due to its potential to optimise the maintenance, long-term reliability and life-cycle cost of infrastructure systems. The main goal of SHM is to identify, characterise and diagnose anomalous performance of structures, usually where the most common approach to attain this goal is by investigation of structural natural frequencies variations. However, not only structural degradations but also environmental conditions can change structural performance; therefore, decoupling natural frequency variations from operational conditions is essential. This paper reports on monitoring system and measurement data of the long-span cable-stayed Suramadu Bridge, in Indonesia. The main objective of this paper is to explore and report the environmental and operational conditions of the bridge for the first time. Also, a detailed finite element (FE) model has been developed to investigate the operational performance of the bridge under different environmental conditions. Results show that vertical modal properties of the Suramadu Bridge are less affected by ambient excitations in comparison with lateral/torsional modes.