Modal Analysis of a Bridge During High-Speed Train Passages by Enhanced Variational Mode Decomposition

Abstract

Modal analysis of bridge under high-speed trains is essential to the design and health monitoring of bridge, but it is difficult to be implemented since the vehicle–bridge interaction (VBI) effect is involved. In this paper, the time–frequency analysis technique is performed on the non-stationary train-induced bridge responses to estimate the frequency variations. To suppress the interference terms in time–frequency analysis but preserve the time-variant characteristics of responses, the enhanced variational mode decomposition (VMD) is proposed, which is used to decompose the train-induced dynamic response into many of envelope-normalized intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). Then the short-time Fourier transform is applied to observe the time–frequency energy distribution of each IMF. The train-induced bridge signals measured from a large-scale high-speed railway bridge are analyzed in this paper. The IMFs associated with the pseudo-frequencies caused by train or the resonant frequencies of bridge are distinguished. And, frequency variations are captured from the time–frequency energy distributions of envelope-normalized IMFs. The results show the proposed method can extract the frequency variations of low-energy IMFs effectively, which are hard to be observed from the time–frequency energy distribution of train-induced bridge response. The instantaneous frequency characteristics extracted from the train-induced bridge response could be the important support for investigating the VBI effect of train–bridge system.