Assessment of acceleration responses of a railway bridge using wavelet analysis

Abstract

One of more effective and practical ways in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is assessing structural movements and detecting corresponding damages in both time and frequency domains. Recently, the wavelet analysis has been used widely in many engineering applications, e.g., SHM, damage detection, and simulation of earthquake ground motions. In this study, the wavelet analysis in one and two dimensions is applied to investigate and assess the movement behavior of a high-speed train railway bridge using the acceleration measurements. Moreover, the wavelet analysis is used to evaluate the degree of correlation between different acceleration measurement points under the different passage train speeds. The high-speed train railway bridge is a double track steel box girder bridge with 50 m length. The high-speed train was controlled to pass over the bridge with four different speeds, i.e. 290, 360, 400, and 406 km/hr. Furthermore, two train passage cases were considered to examine the main girder’s deformation behavior under loaded and unloaded railway tracks simultaneously. The results show that the wavelet analysis proves to be an efficient tool to investigate the frequency content of the acceleration measurements. Finally, the unloaded track suffers more vibration than the loaded track particularly when increasing the train speed.