Vertical vehicle displacement based drive-by inspection of bridge damage with parameter optimization

Abstract

Recently, there has been an increasing emphasis on the Indirect bridge health monitoring method employing passing vehicles, which is regarded as one of the most effective approaches in bridge damage screening. However,few researches have been conducted on the drive-by bridge inspection method using vehicle displacement profile as damage indicator. This paper proposes a new drive-by inspection method based on vertical vehicle displacementprofile with parameter optimization. A generalized Vehicle-Bridge Interaction (VBI) system is built in MATLAB, where the bridge is modelled as a simply supported beam with 10 elements, and the passing vehicle is represented as a simplified quarter car. To improve the result sensitivity to bridge damage, the parameter optimization of vehicle configuration is processed employing the Monte Carlo methods. Results show that the proposed method can successfully detect and localize bridge damage by using vertical vehicle displacement profile as damage indicator only, and its performance may depend on the vehicle configuration. The proposed approach provides merits in simplicity and efficiency, which can be applied widely to the bridge damage detection problems.