Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
  • Publication
    Examining Changes in Bridge Frequency due to Damage using the Contact-Point Response of a Passing Vehicle
    (Taylor & Francis, 2021-06-07) ;
    Ongoing inspection and maintenance of bridges poses a challenging task for infrastructure owners who must manage large bridge stocks with limited budgets. Drive-by monitoring approaches, using sensors in a vehicle, provide a promising solution to this challenge. This paper investigates the use of the response at the point-of-contact between the tyre and the bridge as a means of monitoring bridge frequency. An expression is derived to allow the contact-point (CP) response to be inferred directly from in-vehicle measurements, expanding on previous studies by allowing the vehicle suspension characteristics to be considered. The sensitivity of the CP-response to the pavement characteristics is investigated in detail and a rigid-disk model is used to overcome issues with how existing vehicle-bridge interaction models consider the interaction between the wheel and the pavement. The feasibility of the CP-response as a measure of bridge condition is investigated and results show that the CP-response significantly outperforms the response measured directly on the vehicle. The CP-response is successful in identifying the bridge frequency and changes caused by damage, without being influenced by the vehicle frequencies. Incorporating the CP-response into drive-by bridge monitoring will improve accuracy over existing methods which use the vehicle response alone.
    Scopus© Citations 42  224
  • Publication
    Application of empirical mode decomposition to drive-by bridge damage detection
    A new method is proposed in this paper for bridge damage detection using the response measured in a passing vehicle. It is shown theoretically that such a response includes three main components; vehicle frequency, bridge natural frequency and a vehicle speed pseudo-frequency component. The Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) method is used to decompose the signal into its main components. A damage detection method is proposed using the Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) corresponding to the vehicle speed component of the response measured on the passing vehicle. Numerical case studies using Finite Element modelling of Vehicle Bridge Interaction are used to show the performance of the proposed method. It is demonstrated that it can successfully localise the damage location in the absence of road profile. A difference in the acceleration signals of healthy and corresponding damaged structures is used to identify the damage location in the presence of a road profile. The performance of the method for changes in the transverse position of the vehicle on the bridge is also studied.
    Scopus© Citations 127  743
  • Publication
    Drive-by Bridge Health Monitoring Using Multiple Passes and Machine Learning
    This paper studies a machine learning algorithm for bridge damage detection using the responses measured on a passing vehicle. A finite element (FE) model of vehicle bridge interaction (VBI) is employed for simulating the vehicle responses. Several vehicle passes are simulated over a healthy bridge using random vehicle speeds. An artificial neural network (ANN) is trained using the frequency spectrum of the responses measured on multiple vehicle passes over a healthy bridge where the vehicle speed is available. The ANN can predict the frequency spectrum of any passes using the vehicle speed. The prediction error is then calculated using the differences between the predicated and measured spectrums for each passage. Finally, a damage indicator is defined using the changes in the distribution of the prediction errors versus vehicle speeds. It is shown that the distribution of the prediction errors is low when the bridge condition is healthy. However, in presence of a damage on the bridge, a recognisable change in the distribution will be observed. Several data sets are generated using the healthy and damaged bridges to evaluate the performance of the algorithm in presence of road roughness profile and measurement noise. In addition, the impacts of the training set size and frequency range to the performance of the algorithm are investigated.
      294Scopus© Citations 3
  • Publication
    Damage detection using curvatures obtained from vehicle measurements
    This paper describes a new procedure for bridge damage identification through drive-by monitoring. Instantaneous curvature (IC) is presented as a means to determine a local loss of stiffness in a bridge through measurements collected from a passing instrumented vehicle. Moving reference curvature (MRC) is compared with IC as a damage detection tool. It is assumed that absolute displacements on the bridge can be measured by the vehicle. The bridge is represented by a finite element (FE) model. A Half-car model is used to represent the passing vehicle. Damage is represented as a local loss of stiffness in different parts of the bridge. 1% random noise and no noise environments are considered to evaluate the effectiveness of the method. A generic road surface profile is also assumed. Numerical simulations show that the local damage can be detected using IC if the deflection responses can be measured with sufficient accuracy. Damage quantification can be obtained from MRC.
    Scopus© Citations 21  640
  • Publication
    Experimental Demonstration of a Mode Shape-Based Scour-Monitoring Method for Multispan Bridges with Shallow Foundations
    (American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 2020-08) ; ; ; ;
    This paper experimentally investigates a vibration-based scour monitoring approach applicable to bridges with multiple simply supported spans on shallow foundations. A monitoring strategy based on the relative changes in pier-mode shape amplitudes due to scour is postulated. The first global mode shape of a bridge structure with multiple spans is extracted from acceleration measurements using an output-only approach, frequency domain decomposition (FDD). The relative changes of the pier-mode shape amplitudes under scour are then tracked. Here, each pier-mode shape value is compared with the mean values of the remaining piers in a process that creates a mean-normalized mode shape (MNMS). The approach is demonstrated on a scaled model of a bridge with four spans, supported on sprung foundations, where scour is simulated by the replacement of springs, with springs of lower stiffness corresponding to a reduction in foundation stiffness. It is shown that at a given “scoured” pier, significant increases in the MNMS value occur, suggesting that the location of the scour can be identified. The magnitude of the MNMS at a given pier also increases with an increase in stiffness loss due to scour. In practice, the approach would work best by carrying out a visual inspection of the bridge to establish the initial health condition at the time of sensor installation. After this initial process, the bridge can be monitored remotely for scour on an ongoing basis.
    Scopus© Citations 30  303
  • Publication
    Investigating the Contact-Point Response for Drive-By Damage Detection in Bridges
    Bridges are critical elements in any road or rail transport network and ensuring their safety is paramount. Recent years have seen significant research efforts to develop cost-effective techniques for bridge monitoring on a large scale. Drive-by bridge inspection techniques, whereby sensors inside a vehicle are used to monitor bridge condition, are at the focus of much of this work. This paper develops a relationship between the measured response in a vehicle and the contact-point response between the wheel and the surface of a bridge using a quarter-car representation of the vehicle. Numerical simulations are carried out to examine the feasibility of using the contact-point response as an indicator of damage. A number of passages of the quarter-car vehicle model traversing a Finite Element representation of a bridge are simulated and the contact-point response is evaluated for each passage. Varying levels of damage are simulated in the bridge to assess whether the presence of damage can be detected by the contact-point response. Results show that the method is very effective at identifying the bridge frequencies and can also detect changes in bridge frequency with increasing damage levels. A major advantage of using the contact-point response as a damage indicator lies in its ability to detect bridge frequencies without being influenced by the vibrational frequencies of the vehicle itself. The contact-point response shows promise for implementation into drive-by bridge inspection regimes, however further work is required to investigate the feasibility of the approach at higher vehicle speeds.
      86
  • Publication
    The feasibility of using Laser Doppler Vibrometer measurements from a passing vehicle for bridge damage detection
    Bridges play an important role in transport infrastructure and it is necessary to frequently monitor them. Current vibration-based bridge monitoring methods in which bridges are instrumented using several sensors are sometimes not sensitive enough. For this reason, an assessment of sensitivity of sensors to damage is necessary. In this paper a sensitivity analysis to bridge flexural stiffness (EI) is performed. A discussion between the use of strain or deflections is provided. A relation between deflection and stiffness can be set by theorem of virtual work, expressing the problem as a matrix product. Sensitivity is obtained by deriving the deflection respect to the reciprocal of the stiffness at every analysed location of the bridge. It is found that a good match between the deflection and the bridge stiffness profile can be obtained using noise-free measurements. The accuracy of sensors is evaluated numerically in presence of damage and measurement noise. Field measurements in the United States are also described to identify the potential issues in real conditions.
    Scopus© Citations 26  311
  • Publication
    A New Damage Indicator for Drive-by Monitoring using Instantaneous Curvature
    Drive-by monitoring has enhanced the possibilities for bridge damage detection, with the potential to deliver a bridge rating in the time it takes an instrumented vehicle to pass overhead. This paper outlines the importance of Instantaneous Curvature (IC) as an indicator of local damage. For the IC calculation, bridge deflections are measured from the vehicle before and after the occurrence of damage, so that a comparison between the two situations can be made. Differences in curvature are clearly visible in numerical simulations, especially at the damage location. A Finite Element model of a simply supported bridge subject to a crossing vehicle is modelled dynamically. In this paper, the Curvature Ratio (CR) is proposed as the damage indicator, defined as the ratio of IC in the current bridge to IC in the corresponding healthy bridge. Road profile and random noise in the simulated measurements are considered to represent realistic conditions. Simulations in MATLAB demonstrate that CR is an effective indicator in most of the analysis cases.
      288
  • Publication
    Identification of bridge mode shapes using Short Time Frequency Domain Decomposition of the responses measured in a passing vehicle
    This paper processes the signals from accelerometers mounted on a vehicle travelling over a bridge. Short Time Frequency Domain Decomposition (STFDD) is used to estimate bridge mode shapes from the dynamic response of the vehicle. In Frequency Domain Decomposition (FDD), several segments are defined on the bridge and the measurement is performed using two instrumented axles. Here, the FDD method is employed in a multi-stage procedure applied to the bridge segments in sequence. A rescaling process is used to construct the global mode shape vector. The performance of the proposed method is validated using numerical case studies. In other indirect bridge identification methods, the road profile may excite the vehicle, making it difficult to detect the bridge modes. This is addressed using two concepts: applying external excitation to the bridge and subtracting signals in the axles of successive trailers towed by the vehicle. The results obtained from the numerical investigation demonstrate that the proposed method can estimate the bridge mode shapes with acceptable accuracy. Sensitivity of the method to added white noise is also investigated.
    Scopus© Citations 214  1197