Identification of distributed damage in bridges from vehicle-induced dynamic responses

Abstract

This article presents a distributed damage identification approach based on dynamic response sensitivity of the moving vehicle. Numerical studies are carried out on a simply supported beam and a continuous two-span bridge under a vehicle with nonlinear springs for identification of distributed damage due to the cracks. Combined Newmark direct integration method and Runge–Kutta method are used to calculate the dynamic responses of the coupled bridge–vehicle system. The numerical results show that the distributed damage(s) can be identified accurately by the measured acceleration data of four virtual moving acceleration sensors and it is insensitive to the measurement noise.