Damage identification of suspender cables by adding virtual supports with the substructure isolation method

Abstract

Damage of bridge cables is mainly manifested as the decrease in cable forces. These forces are affected by the boundary conditions, cable length, cable stiffness, and cable appendages, making it hard to identify the cable forces. Based on the substructure isolation method, this study proposes an approach for cable force identification to judge cable damage by adding virtual supports to each cable so that the cables share the same length and boundary conditions. The cable forces can then be identified according to the relationship between the natural frequency and cable forces. The basic concept is that the boundary sensors are transformed into virtual supports by a linear combination of the convolution of measured responses to achieve the zero boundary response. A finite element model of a suspension bridge was used to validate the proposed method in a simulation. When the virtual supports were added to the cables, the relationship between the cable forces and the natural frequency was almost linear, and the cable damage could be successfully identified with 5% noise. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method was verified experimentally, and the natural frequency of the isolated cable substructure was confirmed to be a highly sensitive damage indicator.