Development of a Low-Cost Data Acquisition System for Using in Reduced-Scale Physical Models for Integral Bridge Abutment Study.
Data acquisition system; open-source hardware and software; bridge abutment; physical model; ratcheting.
The use of integral bridges is advantageous because the absence of expansion joints and bearing pads reduce maintenance costs. However, due to thermal action, the soil close to the abutment is subjected to cyclic loading, which may induce an increase in lateral earth pressures in the abutment wall face and the appearance of ratcheting in the backfill soil. Several researches have made efforts to understand this behavior by using laboratory physical models. Experimental models require data acquisition hardware systems to record variables measured by the instrumentation devices, however, commercial data acquisition systems are usually costly and, therefore, may be out of reach for research projects on a tight budget. This paper aims to present and discuss the design, development and testing of a low-cost data acquisition system built with open-source hardware and software for using in reduced scale physical models for studying the behavior of integral bridge abutments under cyclic loading. The Arduino, an easy-to-use open-source microcontroller, was in communication with a software developed in Python language. The obtained results revealed that the data acquisition system performed consistently with medium absolute errors of 0.59% to 0.92% for soil total pressure cells and 0.07% to 0.10% for linear potentiometer displacement transducers. The system can be used not only for the bridge abutment models, but also for other laboratory tasks as well.