🌉 Soul of the Bridge Post 3: Projections from Another Dimensions

In the previous post, we shared a video of the Soul and its XY-projection — a top-down view of over 10,000 loading events. From that, it was easy to see that the response to blue lane traffic is relatively calm and static, while the response to red lane traffic appears more chaotic. The red cloud even grows over time, indicating that something changed during the 500+ days of monitoring.

In this post, we add two more projections of the same point:

🎥 YZ-projection – view along the axis of the bridge

🎥 XZ-projection – side view

The YZ view reveals the same erratic behaviour under red lane traffic. Periodic “lightning storms” appear during events with several heavy vehicles on the deck. And if you look closely, you can detect slight angular shifts in the main axis of the soul.

(⚠️ Note: The Z-axis is visually scaled ~10x too large in the video for clarity. In reality, a single event would fit inside a 500 mm long, 25 mm diameter garden hose.)

The XZ-projection shows a similar story: red lane traffic dominates the response, and the main axis of the soul shows angular drift.

🔍 All of this suggests that the bridge’s behaviour has changed — especially in the Y-direction, i.e., transversally — when vehicles are driving on the red lane.

And just to be clear: this is an in-service bridge, and yes, the behaviour is well under control. Why? Because we’re constantly tracking the soul. We can see the bridge changing — and respond before it becomes a problem. The capacity of the bridge is well under control, and adequate traffic restrictions have been put in place to slow down the degradation process.