Bridge assessment based on statistical analysis of the response of a vehicle passing over the bridge

Abstract

This study focuses on the vehicle acceleration response as a source of estimating bridge's health condition, since it contains bridge profile information and a change of the bridge profile caused by bridge damage can be detected from change of statistical vehicle response. The wavelet coefficient is used as a damage index. To increase the possibility of detecting the damage, the kurtosis of the index is adopted. By observation from a laboratory experiment, it is found that kurtosis of vehicle response is a sensitive index for bridge damage.