The Greek National Railways have just built a new bridge across the famous Corinth Canal (seen in Jason and the Argonaughts - the clashing rocks) as part of the new high-speed Athens to Patras line. The Corinth Canal truly is one of 18th century; it is almost inconceivable that something so big could have been dug by hand.
Rather unfortunately, the only place the bridge could be build was across a fault line. As the Pelopenese is an active earthquake zone, the bridge is designed to withstand an earthquake even if a train is passing over it at the time. A requirement is for long term monitoring of the structure and the foundations to verify that the fault zone and thus the bridge are not ‘creeping'. Soil Instruments distributor, Neotek OE have installed a system of IPI sensors adjacent to both main span piers, mass concrete temperature gauges in the piers, long base wire crackmeters around the piers and displacement transducers across construction joints.
All of the instrumentation is logger by Soil configured Campbell loggers and all data are transmitted by spread-spectrum radio links, making the Coring bridge the first structure in Greece to have a fully solar powered, radio based geotechnical and structural monitoring system.
Data are relayed to a site PC running I-Site which synchronises with a second PC in the railways head office in Athens. The Greek National Railways are so pleased with the system they are proposing to adopt it throughout Greece.
