Structural monitoring

Structures move slowly. Concrete shrinks and creeps, steel responds to temperature, and loads change over years. Structural monitoring records those changes so engineers can compare a structure’s behaviour with what the design predicted.

Vibrating wire gauges are a common choice for this work. A taut steel wire inside the gauge changes its vibration frequency as the gauge is strained, and a thermistor in the same gauge records temperature so the strain reading can be corrected. A datalogger excites the wire, measures the frequency and stores the result.

The VW Gauge Monitor reads vibrating wire frequency and thermistor temperature, stores more than 1 million data points, and sends readings to a cloud server for remote monitoring.