#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. The Nornickel company specialists have monitored one of the largest bridges across the 69th parallel. A special device increases the efficiency of the Norilsk engineering structures reliability research.
The bridge across the Norilskaya river is the city’s key transport artery. Thousands of people travel across it every day. To ensure the company’s production plan, hundreds of tons of cargo are transported along the bridge around the clock, both by road and by rail.
The six-span bridge on seven pillars, 38 meters long and 8 wide, is noted in the UNESCO collection as ‘the northernmost large bridge in the world beyond the 69th parallel’.
To ensure the reliable operation of the bridge, specialists from the Nornickel Polar Division’s diagnostics center conduct special studies: they record the bridge’s metal structures movement amplitude at a distance, assessing the vibration level.
Monitoring is carried out using special equipment from RDI company. Everything is collected in a compact black suitcase to visualize any vibration movements invisible to the human eye, amplify them and evaluate: where, in what places of the structure problems are. The device is unique: in Russia there are only three sets. Two of them are at the Nornickel’s disposal.
“Shooting is done with wide-resolution video cameras: from 1300 to 29 000 frames per second”, explains Pavel Slipets, director of the diagnostics center at Nornickel’s Polar Division. “Next, the image is decoded. Every dot, every pixel is a vibration sensor. That is, at any point in this image, you can measure the level of vibration, frequency, magnitude and speed of movement”.
The Nornickel’s managers pay special attention to the development of instrumental diagnostics of the company’s industrial assets as one of the main areas of transition to proactive reliability management.
In the History Spot section, we told that the first bridge that connected the banks of the Norilskaya river was a floating one.
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Text: Tatyana Ermolaeva, Photo: Nikolay Shchipko
