Damage Detection in Active Suspension Bridges: An Experimental Investigation

This paper considers a Hilbert marginal spectrum-based approach to health monitoring of active suspension bridge hangers. The paper proposes to takes advantage of the presence of active cables and use them as an excitation mean of the bridge, while they are used for active damping. The Hilbert&n...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Fanhao Meng, Bilal Mokrani, David Alaluf, Jingjun Yu, André Preumont
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2018-09-01
Series:Sensors
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/18/9/3002
Description
Summary:This paper considers a Hilbert marginal spectrum-based approach to health monitoring of active suspension bridge hangers. The paper proposes to takes advantage of the presence of active cables and use them as an excitation mean of the bridge, while they are used for active damping. The Hilbert–Huang transform is used to calculate the Hilbert marginal spectrum and establish a damage index for each hanger of the suspension bridge. The paper aims to investigate the method experimentally, through a series of damage scenarios, on a laboratory suspension bridge mock-up equipped with four active cables; each active cable is made of a displacement actuator collocated with a force sensor. Different locations and levels of damage severity are implemented. For the first time, the investigation demonstrates experimentally the effectiveness of the technique, as well as its limitations, to detect and locate the damage in hangers of a suspension bridge.
ISSN:1424-8220