An indirect bridge frequency identification method using dynamic responses of high-speed railway vehicles

•Bridge frequency identification from moving vehicle at a high speed.•Combine dynamic responses of multiple vehicles moving via a high speed.•Track irregularity can be effectively eliminated using vehicle residual response.•The proposed method is verified through the MDOF vehicle model. The identification of bridge frequencies using dynamic responses of moving vehicles has been studied by many researchers, however, most of them assume that the vehicle moves at a relatively low speed. In the application of high-speed railway bridges, the bridge span is typically short and the train always moves at a very high speed, which implies that the duration of the vehicle traveling on the bridge is very short and the signal recorded from the vehicle is not long enough for signal processing to extract the bridge frequency. The present study proposes a new method to identify the bridge frequency from vehicles moving at a high speed by combining the responses of multiple vehicles. The theoretical analysis is conducted using the simple vehicle-bridge interaction (VBI) model. By subtracting the acceleration responses of adjacent vehicles at the same position on the bridge, the residual vehicle responses were obtained and combined, which eliminated the additional driving frequencies and avoided its interference on the bridge frequency identification. Numerical simulations are then conducted to verify the proposed method, which shows that by combining the acceleration of several vehicles to extend the overall duration of the signal, the frequency resolution can be improved and the bridge frequency can be successfully identified using vehicles travelling at a high speed. The influence of track irregularity, vehicle speed, bridge stiffness, and bridge damping on the identification results has also been studied. In addition, a multi-degree-of-freedom vehicle model is used to further verify the proposed method.