Extraction of bridge information based on the double-pass double-vehicle technique

Abstract

To identify the bridge information from the response of test vehicles passing on it (also known as the indirect approach) has aroused the interest of many researchers thanks to its economy, easy implementation and less disruption to traffic. The surface roughness of bridge remains an obstacle for such method as it contaminates the vehicle response severely and thereby renders many vehicle-response-based bridge identification methods ineffective. This paper aims to eliminate such effect with the responses of two different test vehicles. The proposed method can estimate the surface profile of a bridge based on the acceleration data of the vehicles running on the bridge successively, and obtain the normalized contact point response, which proves to be relatively immune to surface roughness. The frequencies and mode shapes of bridge can be further extracted from the normalized contact point acceleration with spectral analysis and Hilbert transform. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified numerically with a three-span continuous bridge. The influence of measurement noise is also examined.