Abstract
Bridges are designed to withstand different types of loads, including dead, live, environmental, and occasional loads during their service period. Moving vehicles are the main source of the applied live load on bridges. The applied load to highway bridges depends on several traffic parameters such as weight of vehicles, axle load, configuration of axles, position of vehicles on the bridge, number of vehicles, direction, and vehicle’s speed. The estimation of traffic loadings on bridges are generally notional and, consequently, can be excessively conservative. Hence, accurate prediction of the in-service performance of a bridge structure is very desirable and great savings can be achieved through the accurate assessment of the applied traffic load in existing bridges. In this paper, a review is conducted on conventional vehicle-based health monitoring methods used for bridges. Vision-based, weigh in motion (WIM), bridge weigh in motion (BWIM), drive-by and vehicle bridge interaction (VBI)-based models are the methods that are generally used in the structural health monitoring (SHM) of bridges. The performance of vehicle-assisted methods is studied and suggestions for future work in this area are addressed, including alleviating the downsides of each approach to disentangle the complexities, and adopting intelligent and autonomous vehicle-assisted methods for health monitoring of bridges.
Highlights
Bridges are subjected to deterioration caused by detrimental factors, such as aging, fatigue, and corrosion that degrade structural capacity
Drive-by methods are still in the research and technological development phase but they are possibly viable candidates for specific applications of health monitoring of bridges. These methods suffer from the uncertainty caused by mobility parameters of vehicles and lots of influential parameters among which are the physical parameters of the vehicles and the contact surface, that significantly degrade the performances of these methods for real-life applications
The available vehicle-assisted structural health monitoring (SHM) methods reviewed in this paper have valuable features and potentials that can be used by combining them with other SHM techniques such as providing complementary functions to other Vibration-based damage detection (VDD) techniques; using each method as a reliable standalone tool is in doubt due to several deficiencies of each method
Summary
Bridges are subjected to deterioration caused by detrimental factors, such as aging, fatigue, and corrosion that degrade structural capacity. The applied vehicular traffic load is a parameter that can be monitored and their effect is distinguishable from the induced environmental-based structural responses. O’Connor et al [10] proposed a method to estimate the variation of dynamic load based on the static mass of a moving load on a bridge. Chan et al [11] introduced another method to identify the moving dynamic load using a numerical model of bridges and the bridge-vehicle interaction. WIM measures the dynamic axle load of moving vehicles to obtain vehicle weight data. Deng et al [17] proposed a direct method for the identification of axle load from bridge response In their method modal parameters of bridges and the mechanical properties of vehicles are used to develop a vehicle–bridge couple system.
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