Structural health monitoring of cable-supported bridges based on vibration measurements

This presentation summarizes the development of vibration-based structural health monitoring and damage detection methods and their applications to cable-supported bridges. It has been shown that because of very low modal sensitivity of the structures with respect to damage at a component level, only the methods which have high tolerance to incompleteness of measured data, measurement noise, modeling error and structural uncertainty are applicable to large-scale cable-supported bridges for vibration-based damage identification. The research focus has been given to eliminate the environmental effects in vibration-based damage detection. Both parametric and non-parametric procedures are proposed for eliminating the temperature effect in vibration-based damage detection, and several illustrative examples are provided.