State-of-the-Art of Vehicle-Based Methods for Detecting Various Properties of Highway Bridges and Railway Tracks

Abstract

The vehicle scanning method (VSM), an indirect approach for bridge measurement, has attracted intensive attention since it was proposed. By this method, a moving test vehicle is employed to detect the “mechanical” properties of the bridge, e.g. frequencies, mode shapes, damages, etc., utilizing the interaction between the two substructures. Compared with the conventional direct approach that requires quite a few sensors and data loggers to be fitted on the bridge, the advantage of the VSM is obvious: mobility, economy, and efficiency. As for railways, the broader vehicle-based techniques have long been used to detect the “geometrical” properties of the track, such as track profiles and rail conditions. Relatively little use has been made of the interaction between the moving vehicle/train and the track/bridge. This paper is a state-of-the-art report of the VSM’s applications to highway bridges and the vehicle-based techniques to railway tracks. It starts with a summary of the pioneering works by Yang and co-workers on the VSM. Then, the applications of the techniques to highway bridges and railway tracks will be separately reviewed. Conclusions will be made, along with future research directions, at the end of the paper.

Using vehicle–bridge contact spectra and residue to scan bridge's modal properties with vehicle frequencies and road roughness eliminated

“…[12][13][14][15][16][17] Furthermore, the vehicle scanning technique has been extended to the extraction of other bridge properties, such as mode shapes, [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] damping ratios, 26,27 damages, [28][29][30][31][32] and road surface roughness. [33][34][35] Some up-to-date reviews on applications of the VSM to highway bridges and/or railway tracks are available in Zhu and Law 36 and Yang et al 37 Previously, most researches used the vehicle response, that is, the response recorded by sensors installed on the vehicle's body, to identify the bridge modal properties and damages. Such a response suffers from the fact that the vehicle frequency itself may appear as a dominant frequency in the spectrum, thereby hindering the extraction of other bridge frequencies, 12,13,38 which gets worse in the presence of road pavement roughness.…”

“…Furthermore, the vehicle scanning technique has been extended to the extraction of other bridge properties, such as mode shapes, 18–25 damping ratios, 26,27 damages, 28–32 and road surface roughness 33–35 . Some up‐to‐date reviews on applications of the VSM to highway bridges and/or railway tracks are available in Zhu and Law 36 and Yang et al 37 …”

A Theoretical Model to Identify the Fundamental Frequency of Simply Supported Girders from a Passing Heavy Vehicle

“…The disadvantages of a traditional bridge inspection method limit its wide application to highways and urban bridges. To meet the increasing maintenance requirements of these bridges, rapid detection methods and techniques are urgently needed and have received more attention in recent years [1][2][3][4].…”

“…When µ 1 is small, the vehicle frequency is too low to distinguish between vehicle frequency and speed terms in the spectrogram. 4.…”

HierMUD: Hierarchical Multi-task Unsupervised Domain Adaptation between Bridges for Drive-by Damage Diagnosis

“…to collect structural performance data, have been developed to achieve continuous and autonomous 1 Stanford University, CA, USA 2 Stony Brook University, NY, USA 3 Carnegie Mellon University, PA, USA bridge health monitoring (BHM). Yet, such sensing methods are hard to scale up as they require on-site installation and maintenance of sensors on every bridge and cause interruptions to regular traffic for running tests and maintaining instruments (Yang et al 2020a).…”