Wind Pressure and Strain Measurements on Bridges. I: Instrumentation/Data Collection System

Abstract

The University of Colorado at Denver has been studying the effect of wind pressure on historic bridges to determine the structural adequacy of these structures. A number of historic bridges have been field instrumented and tested to determine the member forces due to actual lateral wind pressures. This paper focuses on the instrumentation/data collection system developed for the project and field data collection for one bridge. The instrumentation/data collection system needed to be low cost due to the project budget and needed to obtain measurements at a sampling rate sufficiently rapid to capture short-duration wind gusts.