Abstract
Abstract. Recently, there has been an increasing emphasis in the Indirect bridge health monitoring method employing passing vehicles, which is regarded as one of the most effective approaches in bridge damage screening. However, few researches have been conducted on the Drive-by bridge inspection method using vehicle displacement profile as damage indicator due to the challenges in displacement measurement and result accuracy. This paper proposes an optimization approach of designing the optimum vehicle parameters to improve the performance of vehicle displacement-based Drive-by bridge damage inspection. A generalized Vehicle-Bridge Interaction (VBI) system is built in MATLAB, where the bridge is modelled as a simply supported beam with 10 elements and the passing vehicle is represented as a simplified quarter car. Employing the Monte Carlo methods, the optimum parameters are determined by numerous simulations processed under diverse damage scenarios. Results show that by employing the optimal vehicle parameters, the bridge damages can be detected effectively and accurately for general damage scenarios based on the vehicle displacement profile. The proposed optimization method can contribute to the wide application of vehicle displacement-based Drive-by bridge damage inspection, providing merits in simplicity and visualization.
Highlights
It is acknowledged that more than 11% of bridges are structurally deficient in the United States, and in Europe most bridges were constructed from 1945 to 1965 (Malekjafarian et al 2015)
The conventional SHM is known as the “sensor-base monitoring”, which requires numerous sensors placed on the bridge, and its performance is highly dependent on the location and sensitivity of sensors (Sohn et al 2003)
To achieve a better performance in feasibility and cost efficiency, an Indirect-SHM method of employing the passing vehicle is proposed by Yang et al (2004), regarded as one of the most effective approaches in bridge damage detection
Summary
It is acknowledged that more than 11% of bridges are structurally deficient in the United States, and in Europe most bridges were constructed from 1945 to 1965 (Malekjafarian et al 2015). To achieve a better performance in feasibility and cost efficiency, an Indirect-SHM method of employing the passing vehicle is proposed by Yang et al (2004), regarded as one of the most effective approaches in bridge damage detection. Structural damages will lead to changes in bridge dynamic properties, and it is feasible to extract the frequency changes due to bridge damage by tracking the vehicle responses. Based on diverse damage indicators, there are generally three approaches of bridge damage inspection employing passing vehicles. This paper proposes a new method of Drive-by inspection with parameter optimization, which employs the vehicle displacement profile as damage indicator. The damage severity is defined as x% reduction in the element, while the damage location is described as the specific element in which the damage occurs
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