The use of vibration data for damage detection in bridges: A comparison of system identification and pattern recognition approaches

Abstract

This paper briefly outlines the rationale for structural health monitoring as an integral component of bridge management systems. Two different approaches, system identification and statistical pattern recognition, are summarised and applied in turn to vibration data collected from three scale model-reinforced concrete bridges. The results show that the system identification paradigm can successfully locate and quantify the damage to the decks when they are loaded to incipient collapse, especially when experience is used to determine the parameters to use in the finite element updating procedure. However, the study also demonstrated that this approach requires a large amount of high quality ..