Bridge Damage Identification from Moving Load Induced Deflection Based on Wavelet Transform and Lipschitz Exponent

Abstract

The wavelet transform and Lipschitz exponent perform well in detecting signal singularity. With the bridge crack damage modeled as rotational springs based on fracture mechanics, the deflection time history of the beam under the moving load is determined with a numerical method. The continuous wavelet transformation (CWT) is applied to the deflection of the beam to identify the location of the damage, and the Lipschitz exponent is used to evaluate the damage degree. The influence of different damage degrees, multiple damage, different sensor locations, load velocity and load magnitude are studied. Besides, the feasibility of this method is verified by a model experiment.