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.