Concrete Culvert Bridge Condition Monitoring Using Acceleration Responses: A Case Study

Abstract

Vibration-based structural health and condition monitoring has become one of the main methods for monitoring changes, in particular damage in a structure on a global scale. However, it has not been widely used for identifying condition change of the structure itself. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of utilising acceleration responses measured from a short-span concrete culvert bridge located in New South Wales, Australia, to identify the effects of structural condition changes due to bridge widening. The frequency-domain decomposition (FDD) technique was applied on the acceleration data, from which the decrease in modal frequency was observed caused by the event of bridge expansion, demonstrating the capability of FDD for identifying the change in natural frequency due to bridge structural change.