Abstract
Suspender cables are one of the most vulnerable components of a suspension bridge; therefore, development of effective methods for damage detection is imperative. Many previous damage detection methods require an accurate finite element model, which is often difficult to obtain. This article proposes a model-free test method for damage diagnosis of suspender cables that avoids this problem. The method includes two procedures: the mean normalized curvature difference procedure and the curvature difference probability procedure. Numerical results for single and multiple damage cases indicate that: (1) both procedures can be effective for damage diagnosis of suspender cables; (2) small damage can be more easily diagnosed in long suspender cables than short ones, for example, 5% stiffness reduction in long suspender cables can be diagnosed; and (3) noise is generally not a problem, because the signal-to-noise ratio can be improved by increasing the pulse excitation magnitude for a suspender cable. The proposed test method does not eliminate the need for manual inspection, but changes it from observation to a more quantified method. All of these points increase the potential of the proposed method for practical applications.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 771-784 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering |
Volume | 30 |
Issue number | 10 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Oct 1 2015 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Civil and Structural Engineering
- Computer Science Applications
- Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
- Computational Theory and Mathematics