Advisory Committee Chair
Nasim Uddin
Advisory Committee Members
Mohamed Haider
Christopher J Waldron
Thomas Attard
Ashraf Z Al-Hamdan
Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
2018
Degree Name by School
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) School of Engineering
Abstract
Recently, drive-by bridge inspection has become an intriguing topic in the bridge health monitoring domain. The technique utilizes indirect measurements from the suspension system of a vehicle passes over the bridge to infer the bridge structural health condition. A number of studies have given confidence, hypothetically, in the feasibility of the approach in detecting, quantifying and localizing the damage. However, there is a scarcity of work investigating the fidelity of this technique to full-scale field applications. Whereas the wide number of uncertainties that governs the vehicle bridge interaction dynamics could significantly impact hypothetical techniques when applied in the field, the faint signature of the bridge vibration in the vehicle responses represents the major bottleneck to the drive-by bridge inspection approaches. This dissertation aims to solve this dilemma by investigating a number of approaches, hypothetically as well as using a full-scale field experiments. The first technique employs the acceleration history of an unspecialized vehicle to identify the level of deterioration in the bridge. Following, we investigate using the Inverse Dynamics in solving the vehicle equation of motion to quantify the damage extent and location. The exposition of these two techniques will highlight the necessity for a technique, capable of amplifying the feeble bridge vibration present in the vehicle responses. To this end, we finally present a novel technique, namely Frequency Independent Underdamped Penning Stochastic Resonance, which possess the capability of amplifying feeble signal disrupted by a sever background noise by using rather than suppressing the noise. The dissertation starts with an intensive literature present the most highlighted work in this field of research. The following chapter presents the MATLAB algorithm which has been developed to simulated the Vehicle-Bridge Interaction dynamics. Afterward, the three techniques are presented, and the final section exposes a summary of the dissertation.
Recommended Citation
Elhattab, Ahmed, "Drive-By Bridge Damage Inspection And Monitoring" (2018). All ETDs from UAB. 1587.
https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/etd-collection/1587