Time-Frequency Characteristics of Vehicle-Bridge Interaction System for Structural Damage Detection Using...

Area of Science:

• Civil Engineering
• Structural Health Monitoring
• Signal Processing

Background:

• Structural damage in bridges is often localized and affects the dynamic response to moving vehicles.
• Vehicle-bridge interaction (VBI) is a complex non-stationary process sensitive to structural integrity.
• Accurate identification of local damage requires analyzing time-varying bridge response characteristics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel method for extracting time-varying characteristics of VBI systems for bridge structural health monitoring.
• To investigate the efficacy of the multi-synchrosqueezing transform for damage detection.
• To analyze the influence of damage parameters, vehicle speed, and road roughness on VBI system characteristics.

Main Methods:

• Development of a vehicle-bridge interaction model to simulate bridge responses under moving vehicles.
• Application of a novel multi-synchrosqueezing transform to decompose and analyze non-stationary VBI signals.
• Simulation of various concrete bridge damage scenarios to test the method's robustness.

Main Results:

• The proposed multi-synchrosqueezing transform method effectively extracts time-varying features from VBI systems.
• The method accurately identifies structural damage by analyzing these extracted features.
• Simulations demonstrated the influence of damage severity, vehicle speed, and road conditions on the VBI characteristics.

Conclusions:

• The novel multi-synchrosqueezing transform is a powerful tool for bridge structural health monitoring.
• Extracted time-varying features of VBI systems serve as reliable indicators of structural damage.
• The method shows potential for efficient and accurate real-world bridge damage assessment.