Structural health monitoring with statistical methods during progressive damage test of S101 Bridge
(2014)
For the last decades vibration based damage detection of engineering structures has become an important issue for maintenance operations on transport infrastructure. Research in vibration based structural damage detection has been rapidly expanding from classic modal parameter estimation to modern operational monitoring. Since structures are subject to unknown ambient excitation in operation conditions, all estimates from the finite data measurements are of statistical nature. The intrinsic uncertainty due to finite data length, colored noise, non-stationary excitations, model order reduction or other operational influences needs to be considered for robust and automated structural health monitoring methods. In this paper, two subspace-based methods are considered that take these statistical uncertainties into account, first modal parameter and their confidence interval estimation for a direct comparison of the structural states, and second a statistical null space based damage detection test that completely avoids the identification step. The performance of both methods is evaluated on a large scale progressive damage test of a prestressed concrete road bridge, the S101 Bridge in Austria. In an on-site test, ambient vibration data of the S101 Bridge was recorded while different damage scenarios were introduced on the bridge as a benchmark for damage identification. It is shown that the proposed damage detection methodology is able to clearly indicate the presence of structural damage, if the damage leads to a change of the structural system.
For the last decades vibration based identification of damage on civil Engineering structures has become an important issue for maintenance operations on transport infrastructure.
Research in that field has been rapidly expanding from classic modal Parameter estimation using measured excitation to modern operational monitoring. Here the difficulty is to regard to the specific environmental and operational influence to the structure under observation. In this paper, two methods accounting for statistical and/or operational uncertainties are applied to measurement data of a progressive damage test on a prestressed concrete bridge. On the base of covariance driven Stochastic Subspace Identification (SSI) an algorithm is developed to monitor and automatically compute confidence intervals of the obtained modal parameters. Furthermore, a null space based non-parametric damage detection method, utilizing a statistical χ2 type test is applied to the measurement data. It can be shown that for concrete bridges the proposed methodology is able to clearly indicate the presence of structural damage, if the damage leads to a change of the structural system.