A new technology designed by a Lawrence company for checking cracks and metal fatigue in bridges was tested Friday on the southbound span of the Kansas River bridge.

“There’s nothing wrong with the bridge; we’re just being allowed to run a test,” said Dave Johnson, vice president of Pinnacle Technologies Inc., 2721 Ore.

Pinnacle worked with Materials Technologies Inc., or MATECH, of Los Angeles, and employees from each firm placed a dozen sensors on girders under the bridge. An antennae on the side of the bridge picked up electronic data from the sensors and transmitted it to a nearby laptop computer for analysis.

Pinnacle developed the software and wireless electronics as a subcontractor for MATECH, which specializes in metal fatigue detection.

“Everything has gone pretty well,” Johnson said by early afternoon. “We’ve got data from all 12 sensors streaming into the computer.”

Hans Harmon, software engineer with Pinnacle Technologies Inc., Lawrence, left, and Monty Moshier, consulting senior scientist with Material Technologies Inc., of Los Angeles, do practice fatigue testing Friday on the Kansas River bridge just north of Massachusetts Street.

The system would be used to detect unknown cracks in a bridge’s metal pieces as well as provide information on cracks already identified.

“This helps find really small cracks early,” said Monty Moshier, consulting senior scientist for MATECH. “If there are a lot of cracks then it (the system) will tell which cracks are growing and helps determine the priority for what needs to be fixed first.”

The system measures vibrations passing vehicles have on the cracks.

Moshier described the bridge testing as similar to a taking an EKG of a human heart.

“We can find the difference between a normal rhythm and an abnormal rhythm,” he said.

Pinnacle was founded in 1995 as an engineering consulting firm to provide engineering and environmental services to private and government clients. It develops new products for marketing and finds problem solutions for clients.

The Kansas Department of Transportation does visual inspections of bridges and uses magnetic detection to find cracks in steel, also known as “eddy current” testing, spokeswoman Maggie Thompson said.