Infrastructure monitoring for safety
Infrastructure monitoring is a crucial aspect to guarantee the safety of roads, bridges, viaducts and any other works in general.
It is essential to closely monitor infrastructure to ensure optimal management throughout its lifecycle, allowing the management and the maintenance staff to predict and address any problems on time and effective way.
Although they may seem immobile, infrastructures have their own intrinsic dynamics, they wear out over time, suffer various stresses such as vibrations, compressions, extensions and are exposed to humidity, heat, cold and frost.
Thanks to appropriately positioned sensors, it is possible to continuously detect a wide range of crucial data for efficient monitoring of the infrastructure. By then transmitting this information to a central platform that collects and processes the data, managers can evaluate the behavior of the structures and materials to predict any changes and quickly understand what type of actions to make the structure safe.
Safer infrastructures thanks to EIT Smart and Itaca: The case of the Marconi Express
EIT Smart and Itaca, an innovative startup that offers a complete infrastructure monitoring service, have collaborated to guarantee the safety of the Marconi Express, a monorail line, which, with a length of approximately 5 kilometers, connects Bologna’s Guglielmo Marconi Airport to the station Bologna Centrale railway.
The intervention involved the application of 50 sensors for the structural monitoring of the thermal expansions of the Bologna’s Marconi Express infrastructure. The devices are composed of a unit equipped with a 0G Sigfox radio module connected to linear potentiometric displacement transducers that monitor the distance between the tracks with a precision of a tenth of a millimetre.
The aim of the application is to remotely monitor the state of the transport infrastructure in order to:
- Guarantee service continuity, promptly detecting any failures that could lead to system downtime as well as potential safety problems
- Enable the implementation of predictive maintenance logics through the creation of artificial intelligence algorithms and increase the timeliness and effectiveness of railway maintenance activities
The devices are programmed to collect movement and temperature information and send it every 2 hours via the 0G Sigfox network. The data collected in this way is displayed and shared via a web application. An integration has also been carried out on the Telegram App, which allows you to automatically query the latest readings without necessarily having to access the application.
The effectiveness of the Sigfox 0G network for infrastructure monitoring
Thanks to its long communication distances and its scalability, the Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) in 0G Sigfox technology is perfect for the static monitoring of infrastructures using easy, long-lasting (months/years) battery-powered sensors to install and require minimal maintenance.
0G Sigfox technology, in fact, is characterized by simplicity, resistance, low emissions and low energy consumption, thanks to the characteristics of the Ultra Narrow Band (UNB) protocol.
0G Sigfox technology allows data transmission even over long distances as the sensors transmit data in broadcast mode which is receivable from any base station placed within the object’s transmission range.
This guarantees high network scalability, thanks to signal penetration and the high number of managed nodes.
EIT Smart is the only 0G Sigfox Operator in Italy, and is one of the partners of the 0G Sigfox Operator community which uses the same 0G Sigfox communication standard in 70 countries around the world, guaranteeing optimal global network interoperability at a global level.
