Damage Detection of a Continuous Bridge from Response of a Moving Vehicle

This paper presents a multistage multipass method to identify the damage location of a continuous bridge from the response of a vehicle moving on the rough road surface of the bridge. The vehicle runs over the bridge several times at different velocities and the corresponding responses of the vehicle can be obtained. The vertical accelerations of the vehicle running on the intact and damaged bridges are used for identification. The multistage damage detection method is implemented by the modal strain energy based method and genetic algorithm. The modal strain energy based method estimates the damage location by calculating a damage indicator from the frequencies extracted from the vehicle responses of both the intact and damaged states of the bridge. At the second stage, the identification problem is transformed into a global optimization problem and is solved by genetic algorithm techniques. For each pass of the vehicle, the method can identify the location of the damage until it is determined with acceptable accuracy. A two-span continuous bridge is used to verify the method. The numerical results show that this method can identify the location of damage reasonably well.