2025 Volume 4 Issue 1 Pages 95-104
Japan's road bridges were intensively constructed during the period of high economic growth, and will rapidly age in the future. Among road bridges, fatigue cracks are sometimes confirmed during inspections of steel bridges. Fatigue cracks are generally investigated using magnetic particle testing. In recent years, LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) wireless modules capable of long-distance wireless communication have been developed, but there are few reports on their application to actual bridges. Therefore, in this paper, we performed dynamic strain measurements and estimated the cause of fatigue cracks that occurred in an actual bridge where there are restrictions on traffic regulations and on-site work. In addition, we monitored the period before and after taking measures against fatigue cracks using LPWA to verify the effectiveness of the measures. The measurement results showed that it was possible to estimate the cause of occurrence and confirm the effectiveness of countermeasures using LPWA.
