Introduction
This case-study consists of a reduced-scale aluminium bridge thermally expanded by infrared heaters. Its design has been inspired by the New Joban Line Arakawa (Japan) railway bridge. It has been manufactured and assembled at the Civil Engineering Laboratory of the University of Warwick. The following technicians/students have been involved in this project: Arnett Taylor, Neil Gillespie, Colin Banks, Zong Tan, Yanjie, Zhu, Hassib Abdulrazaq and Hannah Davies.
Monitoring system and predictive model
I have developed a LabView routine to automatically control the heaters, based on required and measured temperatures, through use of a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller. Additionally, the behaviour of the bridge under temperature variation has been simulated with a finite element (FE) model, which I have developed in ANSYS.
