Identification of bridge bending frequencies through drive-by monitoring compensating vehicle pitch detrimental effect
Lorenzo Benedetti,Lorenzo Bernardini,Antonio Argentino,Gabriele Cazzulani,Claudio Somaschini,Marco Belloli
Abstract
Bridge structural health monitoring with the aim of continuously assessing structural safety and reliability represents a topic of major importance for worldwide infrastructure managers. In the last two decades, due to their potential economic and operational advantages, drive-by approaches experienced growing consideration from researcher and engineers. This work addresses two technical topics regarding indirect frequency estimation methods: bridge and vehicle dynamics overlapping, and bridge expansion joints impact. The experimental campaign was conducted on a mixed multi-span bridge located in Lombardy using a Ford Galaxy instrumented with a mesh of wireless accelerometers. The onboard time series were acquired for a number of 10 passages over the bridge, performed at a travelling speed of 30 km/h, with no limitations imposed to traffic. Exploiting an ad-hoc sensors positioning, pitch vehicle motion was compensated, allowing to estimate the first two bridge bending frequencies from PSD functions; moreover, the herein adopted approach proved to be insensitive to joints disturbance. Conclusively, a sensitivity study has been conducted to trace the relationship between estimation accuracy and number of trips considered in the analysis. Promising results were found, pointing out a clear positive correlation especially for the first bending frequency.
Key Words
bridges; drive-by monitoring; expansion joint; indirect frequency estimation; structural health monitoring; vehicle pitch compensation
Address
Lorenzo Benedetti, Lorenzo Bernardini, Antonio Argentino, Gabriele Cazzulani, Claudio Somaschini, Marco Belloli — Department of Mechanical Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Via G. La Masa 1, Milano, 20156, Italy
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