BRIDGE CONDITION ASSESSMENT USING A MOVING VEHICLE AS AN ACTUATOR

As for the assessment of bridge health condition, this paper describes an inverse problem solving for unknown material parameters using a moving vehicle as an actuator for bridge vibration. An object function for the element stiffness index which indicates the ratio of damaged flexural rigidity of the finite element of a beam to undamaged one is subtracted from a pseudo-static formulation of equations of motion for a bridge-vehicle interactive system. The Damped Least Squares (DLS) and Total Least Squares (TLS) minimizations are adopted for optimization methods to solve the inverse problem. An analytical study suggests feasibility of the proposed method for the bridge-condition assessment.