BIM as a tool for Structural Health Monitoring

The number of structures that have reached the end of their service life and are in a serious aging and deterioration conditions are increasing day by day. On the other hand, the new constructions are larger and subjected to higher load conditions. In order to deal with these issues Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) plays a key role in the AEC industry both for the control of the builded heritage and for the new constructions realization process ensuring a higher safety level. In parallel with this innovation process the use of innovative tools occurs for the management of the great amount of data. Furthermore the application of new generation smart sensors S3 has been tested for the realization of the monitoring system. For this purpose Building Information Modelling (BIM) is useful with its capability to store data and manage all the aspects related to a project starting from the design, through the construction and until the maintenance phase. The aim of the thesis work is to elaborate an automatic SHM design process for the monitoring of bridges with the help of the BIM potentialities. The methodology has been designed and tested with the help of two case studies: a simple three storey building and the Stura bridge that is an important infrastructure with a strategic role in the connection between the city of Turin and the Caselle International Airport. The workflow started with the creation of the Revit model of a generic building that has been exported in Robot in order to perform a structural analysis and then the results has been organized in Excel files. Subsequently, with the use of the Revit integrated visual programming language Dynamo, different scripts have been created for the automatic placement of the sensors in the model according to different monitoring levels. After the first design, the scripts have been adapted in order to work properly on a bridge by applying them on the model of the Strura bridge. In addiction, in order to test further the suitability of the BIM methodology to the SHM purposes, some models of real monitoring systems have been realized in the Revit environment. The result of the study is a digital twin of the monitored items containing the elements of the SHM system that could be used as a “flight recorder” of the structure and an automatic routine for the creation of a monitoring mechanism that could be applied to different bridge typologies. During the elaboration of the process some problems related to interoperability problems among softwares have been encountered but the introduction of the SHM components in the BIM environment is the most logical development and currently one of the main trend in the evolution of the construction and design process. This thesis is expected to be a starting point for future researches aimed at improving the suitability and efficiency of the developped system.