🌉 Soul of the BridgePost 2: What does the Soul look like?

The Soul of the Bridge is a visualisation that captures the bridge’s behaviour in 3D space - This is made possible by Koherent’s sub-millimetre accurate displacement sensors, which give us the exact location of a point in the structure — with high frequency.

Each point on a bridge, during a single loading event, occupies a very small physical volume — less than a shot of single malt (even with our large deflections of  >300 mm).

But when you overlay 10,000 events on top of each other, that space becomes something much more: It becomes a cloud, a pattern, a living trace of how the bridge breathes and bends under real traffic.

And here’s the hypothesis:

By following this volume — the space needed by a specific point to complete its daily tasks — we can detect changes.

Sometimes the change is in the traffic (although that tends to be quite stable year-round, with some seasonal variation). But other times, the change is in the structure itself.

And by looking at the projections of this cloud — XY, ZX, ZY — we start to get more hints on where a defect might be. Is the projected area growing, changing shape, it its axis shifting?

By plotting the X, Y, Z values against each other, and comparing them to various running averages, we can see shifts in symmetry or stiffness.

And finally, by analysing accelerations, we can spot the exact moment when the structure changes, when something yields, detaches or deforms.

·       A few years ago, this kind of analysis would have been pure sci-fi👽.

But now? I think we’re standing at the edge of a small revolution in bridge monitoring.

We are living interesting times here… ⚙️🌉

In the example video, we focus on one single point on the bridge — located at the 1/3 point of the main span, where deflections often exceed 300 mm.

🔴 Red = traffic in lane 1

🔵 Blue = traffic in lane 2

Each day, we select the 20 largest deflection events and track how this point moves. This has been done for more than 500 days — resulting in over 10,000 load events.

The result is what you see in the animation:

a cloud of movement, formed by real traffic, day after day. On the right side we show the XY-projection of the soul (note that both x and y axis are here 60 mm long).

And here it gets interesting.

Notice how the red results splash into the blue area. This is not normal. It’s a clear anomaly — and it tells us something has changed in how the bridge responds to traffic.

This is why visualisation is the king. It reveals what traditional number-crunching misses. It shows when the Soul shifts.

In the following posts, we’ll dig into this anomaly and what it revealed … 🕵️