The Luna Quarterly

Luna Innovations, in conjunction with our partner Structural Monitoring Services (SMS), recently took part in a never-before-done project. An eight-mile section of elevated railway in the United States is now being monitored using Luna’s HYPERION platform paired with our os7500 Fabry Perot accelerometers. Together, these instruments allow our customer to “listen” for wire breaks in the structure. 

Using three HYPERION interrogators and 163 accelerometers, the structure is monitored 24/7 with a >99%  uptime since 2019. Local detection allows for reinforcement of the structure if the integrity is compromised due to clustering of wire breaks. Such occurrences can be disastrous, and in extreme cases, even cause the structure to collapse. As a result, our monitoring system provides the community an added level of security, as a section of the railway runs over a busy highway.

This is the first installation of its type using optical accelerometers.  With many hundreds of pre- and post-tensioned bridges throughout the US and around the world, this opens a significant new market segment for Luna.