• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.287-301
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• 2012

It is well known that overloaded vehicles may cause severe damages to bridges, and how to estimate and evaluate the status of the overloaded vehicles passing through bridges become a challenging problem. Therefore, based on the monitored strain data from a structural health monitoring system (SHM) installed on a bridge, a method is recommended to identify and analyze the probability of overloaded vehicles. Overloaded vehicle loads can cause abnormity in the monitored strains, though the abnormal strains may be small in a concrete continuous rigid frame bridge. Firstly, the abnormal strains are identified from the abundant strains in time sequence by taking the advantage of wavelet transform in abnormal signal identification; secondly, the abnormal strains induced by heavy vehicles are picked up by the comparison between the identified abnormal strains and the strain threshold gotten by finite element analysis of the normal heavy vehicle; finally, according to the determined abnormal strains induced by overloaded vehicles, the statistics of the overloaded vehicles passing through the bridge are summarized and the whole probability of the overloaded vehicles is analyzed. The research shows the feasibility of using the monitored strains from a long-term SHM to identify the information of overloaded vehicles passing through a bridge, which can help the traffic department to master the heavy truck information and do the damage analysis of bridges further.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.46-53
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• 2000

In coastal bay waters, bubbles are generated by relatively heavy ship-traffic, breaking waves due to man-made structures and biological activities. Therefore, the bubble-generating mechanism as well as the bubble density distribution in the bay are quite different from the open ocean where breaking waves are major contributor for bubble density distribution. High frequency surface-backscattered signals were obtained in the coastal bay waters and they were analyzed to compare with those from the open waters in terms of the sea-surface backscattering strength at various grazing angles, the reverberation characteristics in the sub-surface layer and spectral spreading of the scattered signals. The results show that, the surface scattered signals have an irregular distribution of amplitude in time and the width of the spectral spreading is wider than that of the open sea with rough surface. Furthermore, the amplitude distribution of the reverberation signals is not following the Rayleigh distribution, that is eon to be a typical pattern for the open ocean. The results of our analysis imply that the bubble size and the bubble density in the bay are quite different from those observed in the open waters.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.471-489
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• 2016

Modal identification based on ambient vibration data has attracted extensive attention in the past few decades. Since the excitation for ambient vibration tests is mainly from the environmental effects such as wind and traffic loading and no artificial excitation is applied, the signal to noise (s/n) ratio of the data acquired plays an important role in mode identifiability. Under ambient vibration conditions, certain modes may not be identifiable due to a low s/n ratio. This paper presents a study on the mode identifiability of an instrumented cable-stayed bridge with the use of acceleration response data measured by a long-term structural health monitoring system. A recently developed fast Bayesian FFT method is utilized to perform output-only modal identification. In addition to identifying the most probable values (MPVs) of modal parameters, the associated posterior uncertainties can be obtained by this method. Likewise, the power spectral density of modal force can be identified, and thus it is possible to obtain the modal s/n ratio. This provides an efficient way to investigate the mode identifiability. Three groups of data are utilized in this study: the first one is 10 data sets including six collected under normal wind conditions and four collected during typhoons; the second one is three data sets with wind speeds of about 7.5 m/s; and the third one is some blind data. The first two groups of data are used to perform ambient modal identification and help to estimate a critical value of the s/n ratio above which the deficient mode is identifiable, while the third group of data is used to perform verification. A couple of fundamental modes are identified, including the ones in the vertical and transverse directions respectively and coupled in both directions. The uncertainty and s/n ratio of the deficient mode are investigated and discussed. A critical value of the modal s/n ratio is suggested to evaluate the mode identifiability of the deficient mode. The work presented in this paper could provide a base for the vibration-based condition assessment in future.