Drive-By Bridge Frequency Identification under Operational Roadway Speeds Employing Frequency Independent Underdamped Pinning Stochastic Resonance (FI-UPSR)

Abstract

Recently, drive-by bridge inspection has attracted increasing attention in the bridge monitoring field. A number of studies have given confidence in the feasibility of the approach to detect, quantify, and localize damages. However, the speed of the inspection truck represents a major obstacle to the success of this method. High speeds are essential to induce a significant amount of kinetic energy to stimulate the bridge modes of vibration. On the other hand, low speeds are necessary to collect more data and to attenuate the vibration of the vehicle due to the roughness of the road and, hence, magnify the bridge influence on the vehicle responses. This article introduces Frequency Independent Underdamped Pinning Stochastic Resonance (FI-UPSR) as a new technique, which possesses the ability to extract bridge dynamic properties from the responses of a vehicle that passes over the bridge at high speed. Stochastic Resonance (SR) is a phenomenon where feeble information such as weak signals can be amplified through the assistance of background noise. In this study, bridge vibrations that are present in the vehicle responses when it passes over the bridge are the feeble information while the noise counts for the effect of the road roughness on the vehicle vibration. UPSR is one of the SR models that has been chosen in this study for its suitability to extract the bridge vibration. The main contributions of this article are: (1) introducing a Frequency Independent-Stochastic Resonance model known as the FI-UPSR and (2) implementing this model to extract the bridge vibration from the responses of a fast passing vehicle.

Natural Frequency Response Evaluation for RC Beams Affected by Steel Corrosion Using Acceleration Sensors

“…Sung et al [ 15 ] used a variety of methods to monitor the bridge structure and verified the accuracy of the acceleration sensor in structural health monitoring. The natural frequency, modal shape, and modal damping are the inherent properties in an RC structure, which are the functions of mass, damping, stiffness, and boundary conditions [ 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 ]; and the natural frequency is also an integral characteristic of one RC structure and any changes in the natural frequency indicate a variation in the structural characteristic, such as damage or strengthen. Mu et al [ 20 ] optimized the uncertainty of modal frequency under the influence of environmental factors.…”

Inverse Filtering for Frequency Identification of Bridges Using Smartphones in Passing Vehicles: Fundamental Developments and Laboratory Verifications

“…In that paper, they successfully extracted bridge frequency from the vibration of the vehicle. Later on, many studies followed the path of indirect bridge monitoring, which can be divided into analytical/numerical analyses [18][19][20][21], lab-scale experiments [22][23][24], and real-life experiments [25,26]. These studies support the fact that the vibration of the passing vehicle contains bridge dynamic response which can be extracted to evaluate bridge condition.…”

Extraction of Bridge Fundamental Frequencies Utilizing a Smartphone MEMS Accelerometer

“…Since the input noise cannot be controlled, the weak signal is extracted by changing the force of the potential field (V′( x )). The force of the potential field is changed by adjusting the potential parameters, V d , L , and x 0 that characterize the potential field [30,31]: V(x)=V0−Vd(exp(−(x+x0)2L2)+exp(−(x−x0)2L2))…”

“…2) The frequency of the weak signal must be known in advance to extract the signal from the noise. To enable using SR in civil structural health monitoring applications, the authors introduce in a previous publication the frequency-independent underdamped pinning stochastic resonance (FI-UPSR) method, which is suitable for mono-stable, underdamped systems [30] and it is a frequency independent SR filter. In that study, FI-UPSR is successfully used to identify the fundamental bridge frequency using indirect measurements collected from an accelerometer mounted on an inspection vehicle passing over the bridge.…”