Cables and hangers are critical components of long-span bridges, tension forces of them are needed to be accurately measured for ensuring the safety of bridges. Traditionally, cable tension forces are measured by attached accelerometers or elastomagnetic (EM) sensors, however, applying these sensors into engineering practice are time-consuming, labor-intensive, and highly dangerous. To address these problems, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based noncontact cable force estimation method with computer vision technologies was proposed in this article. Basic concept of the proposed method is to use the UAV-installed camera for capturing vibration images of cables from a certain distance and cable dynamic properties are extracted by analyzing captured images. It includes two aspects: (a) a line segments detector (LSD) was employed for detecting cable edges from captured video and a line matching algorithm was further proposed for extracting dynamic displacements; (b) the frequency differ-Frequency Difference/ Hz Cable Force / kN F I G U R E 14 Results of the studied suspension bridge: (a) Fourier spectrum by the proposed method; (b) Fourier spectrum by using attached accelerometer; (c) frequency difference; and (d) cable force How to cite this article: Tian Y, Zhang C, Jiang S, Zhang J, Duan W. Noncontact cable force estimation with unmanned aerial vehicle and computer vision.
The rapid impact testing of bridges contains unique advantages. For example, structural parameters, including frequency response function and structural flexibility matrix can be identified; however, additional impact-testing instruments are required to excite a bridge, restricting the efficiency of the measurement strategy in terms of experimental cost and time. In this paper, a particle image velocimetry-based method is proposed for the rapid impact testing and system identification of footbridges under pedestrian excitations. The proposed method has shown promising features: (1) pedestrian load is utilized for the impact excitation of footbridges, which is more convenient than the conventional impacttesting method with additional excitation devices; (2) the human-induced impact forces under varying jumping scenarios are calculated from image sequences of human motions acquired by a single camera with its noncontact and target-less characteristics; and (3) both humaninduced impact forces (inputs) and structural responses (outputs) are employed to identify more modal parameters (i.e., scaling factors, modal mass, and structural flexibility). The robustness of the proposed method was successfully validated by a laboratory test of a simply supported beam and field testing of a cable-stayed footbridge. The proposed method not only could improve
Long‐span bridges are susceptible to vortex‐induced vibration (VIV), which affects the serviceability and safety of bridges when the vibration amplitude is too large and lasts for a long time. Traditional contact‐type sensing technologies (i.e., accelerometers and linear variable differential transformer) are inconvenient and dangerous to be installed on long‐span bridges for monitoring VIV events. To address this limitation, this article focuses on the VIV measurement of a long‐span suspension bridge through noncontact sensing strategies. The contribution of this article lies in (1) noncontact sensing technologies including microwave radar, optical camera and video equipment were employed to measure multiple‐point displacements of the studied bridge under VIV events; (2) dynamic properties of the bridge (i.e., natural frequency, damping ratio, mode shapes) and characteristics of the VIV event (i.e., single‐mode vibration and dominant vibration mode switch) were identified by analyzing monitoring data; (3) an early warning framework for VIV event of long‐span suspension bridges was proposed based on monitored dynamic responses and wind fields; specifically, two indicators, the dominant vibration frequency and the similarity between bridge shape and vibration mode shape, were proposed to identify the VIV event, and then the root mean square (RMS) of measured response was further calculated to determine whether there is a need to trigger the warning system or not. The proposed noncontact VIV measurement strategy has the advantage of rapid measurement of vibration magnitude, rapid identification of dynamic properties of the studied bridge and characteristics of the VIV event, which are helpful for the government and bridge owners to make decisions on vibration mitigation measures and to avoid safety issues.
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