Experimental study on bridge damage identification based on wavelet packet energy curvature difference method

Among various damage identification methods,the Wavelet Packet Energy Curvature Difference (WPECD) method is an effective one.As a regret,most of the existing methods rely only on numerical simulation and are unverified via experiment,and moreover very few of them has been applied to practice.In the paper,the validity of WPECD in structural damage identification was verified by a numerical example.A damage simulation experiment was taken on a real replaced girder at the Ziya River New Bridge in Cangzhou.Two damage cases were simulated and the acceleration responses at the measuring points were obtained,based on which the damages were identified with the WPECD method,and the influences of wavelet function and decomposition level were studied.The results show that the WPECD method can identify structure damage efficiently and can be put into practice.