Structural Health Monitoring of Bridges Using Dynamic Vehicle Force

Abstract

This study aims to investigate feasibility of a drive-by bridge inspection method using dynamic vehicle force. The dynamic vehicle force is identified using accelerations of a traveling vehicle. Dynamic vehicle forces when the vehicle travels on healthy and damage states of bridges are first identified. Differences of the identified dynamic vehicle forces from healthy and damage states of bridges are then considered as a damage sensitive feature for the drive-by bridge inspection. A least square minimization with Tikhonov regularization was utilized to estimate the dynamic vehicle force from acceleration data of the vehicle. A band pass filter is applied to the dynamic vehicle force before estimating the difference of the dynamic vehicle force. The range of the band pass filter was set around 1st natural frequency of the bridge. The feasibility of the proposed method was verified through simulation and a laboratory experiment. It was observed that the severer the bridge damage is, the larger the difference of dynamic vehicle force is, implying a possibility to detect bridge damages successfully by the proposed method.