A review of mobile sensing of bridges using moving vehicles: Progress to date, challenges and future trends

The efficiency of vehicles and travel comfort are maintained by the effective management of road pavement conditions. Pavement conditions can be inspected at a low cost by drive-by monitoring technology. Drive-by monitoring technology is a method of collecting data from sensors installed on a running vehicle. This technique enables quick and low-cost inspections. However, most existing technologies assume that the vehicle runs at a constant speed. Therefore, this study devises a theoretical framework that estimates road unevenness without prior information about the vehicle’s mechanical parameters even when the running speed changes. This paper also shows the required function of sensors for this scheme. The required ability is to collect the three-axis acceleration vibration and position data simultaneously. A field experiment was performed to examine the applicability of sensors with both functions to the proposed methods. Each sensor was installed on a bus in service in this field experiment. The vehicle’s natural frequency estimated from the measured data ranges from 1 to 2 Hz, but the natural frequency estimated by the proposed method is 0.71 Hz. However, the estimated road unevenness does not change significantly with changes in the vehicle’s estimated parameters. The results found that the accuracy of road unevenness estimation seems to be acceptable with the conventional method and the new method. Future work will include improving the algorithm and accuracy verification of the schemes.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Practical Application of Drive-By Monitoring Technology to Road Roughness Estimation Using Buses in Service

Yamamoto

Shin

Sakuma

et al. 2023

“…This section reviews previous studies. Fortunately, there is an extensive review article [ 5 , 6 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 ]. Malekjafarian et al [ 5 ] provided the first comprehensive review of bridge monitoring using vehicle response.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hou et al [ 14 ] comprehensively summarized SHM for bridges from 2010 to 2019 and touched on the challenges of damage detection by drive-by monitoring. Based on the previous review paper [ 5 ], Malekjafarian et al [ 6 ] discussed drive-by monitoring by dividing it into individual and multiple passes.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Existing drive-by-bridge monitoring techniques are affected by road surface irregularities, limited VBI time, and the environment [ 5 ]. Therefore, crowdsourcing information collection and the integrated analysis of multiple data runs are considered [ 6 ]. Integrated data analysis can eliminate influences unrelated to bridge damage, such as measurements and factors that may affect the behavior of bridges.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Discussion on a Vehicle–Bridge Interaction System Identification in a Field Test

Shin

Okada

Yamamoto

2023

For infrastructures to be sustainable, it is essential to improve maintenance and management efficiency. Vibration-based monitoring methods are being investigated to improve the efficiency of infrastructure maintenance and management. In this paper, signals from acceleration sensors attached to vehicles traveling on bridges are processed. Methods have been proposed to individually estimate the modal parameters of bridges and road unevenness from vehicle vibrations. This study proposes a method to simultaneously estimate the mechanical parameters of the vehicle, bridge, and road unevenness with only a few constraints. Numerical validation examined the effect of introducing the Kalman filter on the accuracy of estimating the mechanical parameters of vehicles and bridges. In field tests, vehicle vibration, bridge vibration, and road unevenness were measured and verified, respectively. The road surface irregularities estimated by the proposed method were compared with the measured values, which were somewhat smaller than the measured values. Future studies are needed to improve the efficiency of vehicle vibration preprocessing and optimization methods and to establish a methodology for evaluating accuracy.

“…Indirect or drive-by techniques have recently gained interest among Structure Health Monitoring (SHM) researchers because of the ease with which dynamic responses can be measured [ 2 , 30 , 31 , 32 ]. This technique extracts features of the structure from the dynamic responses measured in a moving body interacting with it, such as a truck or train.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Indirect Monitoring of Frequencies of a Multiple Span Bridge Using Data Collected from an Instrumented Train: A Field Case Study

Malekjafarian

Khan

O’Brien

et al. 2022

Self Cite

In this paper, a field study is carried out to monitor the natural frequencies of Malahide viaduct bridge which is located in the north of Dublin. The bridge includes a series of simply supported spans, two of which collapsed in 2009 and were replaced. The replaced spans are stiffer than most of the others and these differences resulted in higher natural frequencies. An indirect bridge monitoring approach is employed in which acceleration responses from an instrumented train are used to estimate the natural frequencies of each span of the viaduct showing the locations of the two replaced spans with higher stiffness. For the indirect approach, an Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD)-based Hilbert Huang Transform (HHT) technique is employed to identify the natural frequency of each span. This is carried out by analysing the Instantaneous Frequencies (IFs) from the calculated intrinsic mode functions. The average of the IFs calculated using 41 runs of the instrumented train (with varying carriage mass and speed for each run) are used to estimate the natural frequencies. To assess the feasibility of the indirect approach, a bespoke set of direct measurements was taken using accelerometers attached successively on each span of the viaduct. The free and forced vibrations from each span are used to estimate the first natural frequencies. The frequencies obtained from drive-by measurements are compared to those from direct measurements which confirms the effectiveness of indirect approaches. In addition, the instantaneous amplitudes of the drive-by signals are used to indicate the location of the stiffer spans. Finally, the accuracy and robustness of the indirect approaches for monitoring of multi span bridges are discussed.