Europe's first public highway bridge to be built with structural plastics opened Oct. 29 near Oxford, England. It not only pioneers the use of composite materials on an active highway river crossing, but also is a test bed for a novel fiber optic structural monitoring system.
The monitors on the 10-m-long West Mill Bridge use optical strands just 0.0125 cm thick that have been laser-etched with grating patterns in 8-cm-long segments at various points on their lengths. The fibers are bonded to the surfaces of structural elements.