Application of digital photogrammetry in wind tunnel test for bridge model

Abstract

Wind tunnel test of aeroelastic model is the principal means to research the performance of bridge structures in wind flow. Laser interferometer and accelerometer are the two mainly used instruments to measure the wind-induced response of models in wind tunnel test. However, due to limitation of some cases, these two instruments are inapplicable or at least unreliable. Digital image recognition photogrammetry is the technique combining photogrammetry and image recognition. Based on digital photogrammetry (DP), movement information of measured object is recorded by digital video equipment as a series of continuous frames and its accurate position in world coordinate can be recognised by analysis arithmetic. Wind tunnel tests of two bridges were introduced in this paper to verify the applicability of two DP methods, geometry analysis and area-centroid. The analysis result showed that DP provided the signal of high quality and proved a reliable means to compensate the traditional methods for wind tunnel test.