A 3D-printed steel footbridge has been unveiled by a robot in Amsterdam where it will serve as a ‘living laboratory’ to assess the long-term behaviour of metal printed structures. The world’s first 3D-printed steel structure has been developed by Imperial College London and The Alan Turing Institute and built over four years by Dutch company MX3D.
The pedestrian bridge is packed with a network of sensors that will be used by Imperial College London researchers to measure, monitor and analyse the performance of the novel 12-metre-long structure as pedestrians pass over it. According to Imperial, data collected will enable researchers and engineers to measure the bridge’s ‘health’ in real time, monitor how it changes over its lifespan and understand how the public interacts with 3D-printed infrastructure.
Sensor network to turn additive bridge into ‘living laboratory’
Data from the sensors will also be put into a ‘digital twin’ of the bridge, which will help answer questions about the long-term behaviour of 3D-printed steel, as well as its use in real world settings and in future novel construction projects. To get from the conceptual stage to the installed footbridge, the Steel Structures group at Imperial conducted the underpinning research and validation, including testing destructive forces on printed elements, advanced digital twin computer simulations, non-destructive real-world testing on the footbridge and the development of the advanced sensor network to monitor the bridge’s behaviour over its life.