Substructural condition assessment of bridge structures under moving vehicles

Abstract

Bridge infrastructures are continuously subject to degradation, due to aging, their operational environment, and excess loading, which places users at risk. It has now become a major concern worldwide, where the majority of bridge infrastructures are approaching their design life, and the number of bridges in poor condition is increasing. This compels the engineering community to develop robust and reliable methods for continuous monitoring of bridge infrastructures. Most of the existing methods are time-consuming, labour-intensive, and expensive or they are not robust enough to be used in real-world applications. To address this problem, new methods need to be developed, and rather than numerical verifications laboratory and field tests should be carried out for experimental validation. In this research project, condition assessment of bridge structures under moving vehicles is investigated. The bridge subjected to a moving vehicle is subjected to one type of forced vibration test, with no need for traffic interruption and extensive experimental arrangements. Using moving vehicles as an exciter has the ability to induce structural vibration with a large enough amplitude and reasonable signal-to-noise ratio. Experimental and numerical studies on a bridge structure subject to moving loads indicate the robustness and efficiency of the proposed techniques to deal with road roughness, and vehicle speed in moving load identification as well as detecting and quantifying structural damage. The proposed techniques have the potential to reduce the number of sensors needed for bridge structural health monitoring as well as to reduce the computational effort and costs while enhancing the accuracy.

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English