West Gate Bridge, Weigh-in-Motion System – Melbourne

The West Gate Bridge in Melbourne, Australia is a steel box girder cable-stayed bridge and was originally designed to carry 40,000 vehicles per day with a maximum load of 25 tonnes per vehicle. Today, traffic volumes are now 160,000 vehicles per day with some B-double trucks weighing up to 68 tonnes each.

As a result, the bridge operator needed a method to estimate the operational and life span of the bridge. Q-Free was appointed to install a trial Weigh-in-motion system on the bridge to provide valuable data source for these calculations. However, the WIM system couldn’t be installed on the approaches to the bridge because of too many on and off ramps. As a result the only feasible location for the system was to install it on the bridge deck.

Q-Free was able to provide an innovative solution to this problem using a combination of the HI-TRAC® 100 WIM classifier and MEAS BL Class 1 Piezoelectric sensors.