• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.131-154
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• 2012

In this paper, it is aimed to determine the seismic behaviour of highway bridges by nondestructive testing using ambient vibration measurements. Eynel Highway Bridge which has arch type structural system with a total length of 216 m and located in the Ayvaclk county of Samsun, Turkey is selected as an application. The bridge connects the villages which are separated with Suat U$\breve{g}$urlu Dam Lake. A three dimensional finite element model is first established for a highway bridge using project drawings and an analytical modal analysis is then performed to generate natural frequencies and mode shapes in the three orthogonal directions. The ambient vibration measurements are carried out on the bridge deck under natural excitation such as traffic, human walking and wind loads using Operational Modal Analysis. Sensitive seismic accelerometers are used to collect signals obtained from the experimental tests. To obtain experimental dynamic characteristics, two output-only system identification techniques are employed namely, Enhanced Frequency Domain Decomposition technique in the frequency domain and Stochastic Subspace Identification technique in time domain. Analytical and experimental dynamic characteristic are compared with each other and finite element model of the bridge is updated by changing of boundary conditions to reduce the differences between the results. It is demonstrated that the ambient vibration measurements are enough to identify the most significant modes of highway bridges. After finite element model updating, maximum differences between the natural frequencies are reduced averagely from 23% to 3%. The updated finite element model reflects the dynamic characteristics of the bridge better, and it can be used to predict the dynamic response under complex external forces. It is also helpful for further damage identification and health condition monitoring. Analytical model of the bridge before and after model updating is analyzed using 1992 Erzincan earthquake record to determine the seismic behaviour. It can be seen from the analysis results that displacements increase by the height of bridge columns and along to middle point of the deck and main arches. Bending moments have an increasing trend along to first and last 50 m and have a decreasing trend long to the middle of the main arches.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.729-746
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• 2022

In this paper, a nonlinear structural model updating methodology based on the Deep Belief Network (DBN) is proposed. Firstly, the instantaneous parameters of the vibration responses are obtained by the discrete analytical mode decomposition (DAMD) method and the Hilbert transform (HT). The instantaneous parameters are regarded as the independent variables, and the nonlinear model parameters are considered as the dependent variables. Then the DBN is utilized for approximating the nonlinear mapping relationship between them. At last, the instantaneous parameters of the measured vibration responses are fed into the well-trained DBN. Owing to the strong learning and generalization abilities of the DBN, the updated nonlinear model parameters can be directly estimated. Two nonlinear shear-type structure models under two types of excitation and various noise levels are adopted as numerical simulations to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The nonlinear properties of the structure model are simulated via the hysteretic parameters of a Bouc-Wen model and a Giuffré-Menegotto-Pinto model, respectively. Besides, the proposed approach is verified by a three-story shear-type frame with a piezoelectric friction damper (PFD). Simulated and experimental results suggest that the nonlinear model updating approach has high computational efficiency and precision.