• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.20 no.5
• /
• pp.549-562
• /
• 2017

The US railroad network carries 40% of the nation's total freight. Railroad bridges are the most critical part of the network infrastructure and, therefore, must be properly maintained for the operational safety. Railroad managers inspect bridges by measuring displacements under train crossing events to assess their structural condition and prioritize bridge management and safety decisions accordingly. The displacement of a railroad bridge under train crossings is one parameter of interest to railroad bridge owners, as it quantifies a bridge's ability to perform safely and addresses its serviceability. Railroad bridges with poor track conditions will have amplified displacements under heavy loads due to impacts between the wheels and rail joints. Under these circumstances, vehicle-track-bridge interactions could cause excessive bridge displacements, and hence, unsafe train crossings. If displacements during train crossings could be measured objectively, owners could repair or replace less safe bridges first. However, data on bridge displacements is difficult to collect in the field as a fixed point of reference is required for measurement. Accelerations can be used to estimate dynamic displacements, but to date, the pseudo-static displacements cannot be measured using reference-free sensors. This study proposes a method to estimate total transverse displacements of a railroad bridge under live train loads using acceleration and tilt data at the top of the exterior pile bent of a standard timber trestle, where train derailment due to excessive lateral movement is the main concern. Researchers used real bridge transverse displacement data under train traffic from varying bridge serviceability levels. This study explores the design of a new bridge deck-pier experimental model that simulates the vibrations of railroad bridges under traffic using a shake table for the input of train crossing data collected from the field into a laboratory model of a standard timber railroad pile bent. Reference-free sensors measured both the inclination angle and accelerations of the pile cap. Various readings are used to estimate the total displacements of the bridge using data filtering. The estimated displacements are then compared to the true responses of the model measured with displacement sensors. An average peak error of 10% and a root mean square error average of 5% resulted, concluding that this method can cost-effectively measure the total displacement of railroad bridges without a fixed reference.

• Proceedings of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea Conference
• /
• 2002.03a
• /
• pp.159-168
• /
• 2002

A recently developed filbert-Huang transform (HHT) technique is applied to detect damage locations of bridge structures. The HHT may be used to identify the locations of damages which exhibit nonlinear and nonstationary behavior, since the HHT can show the instantaneous frequency characteristics of the signal. A series of numerical simulations were conducted for bridge pier systems with damages under a controlled load with sweeping frequency. The results of the numerical simulation study indicate that the HHT method can reasonably identify damage locations using a limited number of acceleration sensors under severe measurement noise condition.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.16 no.6
• /
• pp.1003-1021
• /
• 2015

MR dampers have been proposed for the control of cable vibration of cable-stayed bridge in recent years due to their high performance and low energy consumption. However, the highly nonlinear feature of MR dampers makes them difficult to be designed with efficient semi-active control algorithms. Simulation study has previously been carried out on the cable-MR damper system using a semi-active control algorithm derived based on the universal design curve of dampers and a bilinear mechanical model of the MR damper. This paper aims to verify the effectiveness of the MR damper for mitigating cable vibration through a full-scale experimental test, using the same semi-active control strategy as in the simulation study. A long stay cable fabricated for a real bridge was set-up with the MR damper installed. The cable was excited under both free and forced vibrations. Different test scenarios were considered where the MR damper was tuned as passive damper with minimum or maximum input current, or the input current of the damper was changed according to the proposed semi-active control algorithm. The effectiveness of the MR damper for controlling the cable vibration was assessed through computing the damping ratio of the cable for free vibration and the root mean square value of acceleration of the cable for forced vibration.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
• /
• v.5 no.1
• /
• pp.51-65
• /
• 2018

A number of sensing techniques have been implemented for detecting defects in civil infrastructures instead of onsite human inspections in structural health monitoring. However, the issue of faults in sensors has not received much attention. This issue may lead to incorrect interpretation of data and false alarms. To overcome these challenges, this article presents a deep learning-based method with a new architecture of Stateful Long Short Term Memory Neural Networks (S-LSTM NN) for detecting sensor fault without going into details of the fault features. As LSTMs are capable of learning data features automatically, and the proposed method works without an accurate mathematical model. The detection of four types of sensor faults are studied in this paper. Non-stationary acceleration responses of a three-span continuous bridge when under operational conditions are studied. A deep network model is applied to the measured bridge data with estimation to detect the sensor fault. Another set of sensor output data is used to supervise the network parameters and backpropagation algorithm to fine tune the parameters to establish a deep self-coding network model. The response residuals between the true value and the predicted value of the deep S-LSTM network was statistically analyzed to determine the fault threshold of sensor. Experimental study with a cable-stayed bridge further indicated that the proposed method is robust in the detection of the sensor fault.

• Proceedings of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea Conference
• /
• 2005.03a
• /
• pp.277-283
• /
• 2005

Inelastic model of Second Jindo Bridge is investigated to perform nonlinear dynamic analyses with various earthquake ground motions. The modal analysis is performed to obtain dynamic characteristics of the bridge and verify the model. It proves that the model has an appropriate dynamic characteristic and its natural frequency is relatively low. Four ground motions are chosen for time history dynamic analyses; El Centro, Kobe, Taft, and Mexico earthquake. Each ground motion multiplied by specified factors to investigate damages of the structure. The analyses prove that responses of the bridge depend on the duration time and the frequency characteristics of ground motion, not only peak acceleration. Static push-over analysis of steel pylon shows that the dynamic analysis over-estimates the seismic behavior of steel pylon definitely. Nonlinear spring hinge model is suggest to improve the shortage of the inelastic model could not deliberate local buckling damage. According to the time history analysis of nonlinear spring hinge model, it is proved that the inelastic beam element analysis overestimate the seismic capacity of steel pylon unquestionably with a large amount of errors.

• Proceedings of the KSR Conference
• /
• 2004.10a
• /
• pp.812-817
• /
• 2004

Recently drastic improvement of railway technology has been accompanied by the construction of very high-speed tracks. It should be noticed that Continuously Welded Rail(CWR) has played significant role in technical development of railway and that installation of CWR is now being scheduled on existing lines as well as newly-built lines. In general, interaction between CWR and bridge deck takes place on bridge section and additional axial force and displacement is to be developed owing to temperature and braking/acceleration forces. This interaction is known to be mainly governed by span organizations and arrangements of foot bearings. In common practice, movable bearing is stationed and designed on the assumption that it is not able to transfer the horizontal force of upper decks. However, it is well known that horizontal resistance is developed in movable bearings due to friction and that friction coefficient of movable bearing is ranged from 0.03 to 0.20 depending on the material of bearings and magnitude of reactions. Therefore, it is easily reasoned out that friction of movable bearing can influence the mutual behavior of CWR and bridge decks. Suggested in this study is to investigate the validity and efficiency of friction effect of movable bearings in controlling the axial force and displacement of CWR on continuous railway bridges.

• Steel and Composite Structures
• /
• v.31 no.5
• /
• pp.437-452
• /
• 2019

In this study, in-situ static and dynamic tests of four pre-stressed concrete (PC) track beams with different span lengths and curvatures in a straddle monorail transit system were reported. In the static load tests, the strain and deflection at critical sections of the PC track beams were measured to determine the load bearing capacity and stiffness. The dynamic responses of strain, deflection, acceleration, and displacement at key positions of the PC track beams were measured under different train speeds and train loads to systematically study the dynamic behaviors of the PC track beams. A three-dimensional finite element model of the track beam-vehicle coupled vibration system was established to help understand the dynamic behavior of the system, and the model was verified using the test results. The research results show that the curvature, span length, train speed, and train loads have significant influence on the dynamic responses of the PC track beams. The dynamic performance of the PC track beams in the curve section is susceptible to dynamic loads. Appropriate train loads can effectively reduce the impact of the train on the PC track beam. The PC track beams allow good riding comfort.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
• /
• v.28 no.1A
• /
• pp.59-67
• /
• 2008

Acceleration time history used in the seismic analysis of nuclear power plant structures should envelop a target power spectral density (PSD) function in addition to the design response spectrum in order to have sufficient energy at each frequency for the purpose of ensuring adequate load. The safety for complex long-span highway bridges cannot be over-emphasize. An alternative method to improve the seismic capacity is to ensure the minimum PSD function of the applied seismic load. This study proposes a technical scheme to obtain the reference power spectral density function by using artificial earthquakes which are compatible with the highway bridge design spectrum.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
• /
• v.24 no.6
• /
• pp.655-662
• /
• 2011

For analyzing seismic performance of long-span bridge for multi-support excitation and preparing technically and efficiently for a variety of design demands, the new module on multiple excitation was built in a reliable non-linear analysis program(RCAHEST) by using Influence Line Method, and the study on structures was performed previously. Also, the result of the analysis through RCAHEST was compared and verified with commercial finite element analysis program SAP2000 by using the feature of Multi-Support Excitation. From these results, nonlinear time history analysis considering multi-support excitation was studied after designing FE model of Incheon cable-stayed bridge. It was proved that the maximum response of horizontal displacement decreased as the time delay was increasing at all nodes of bridge. And then the serviceability of analysis model was evaluated by performing ultimate analysis under changes in maximum acceleration of seismic load data.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
• /
• v.54 no.2
• /
• pp.257-289
• /
• 2015

Shear connectors are generally used to link the slab and girders together in slab-on-girder bridge structures. Damage of shear connectors in such structures will result in shear slippage between the slab and girders, which significantly reduces the load-carrying capacity of the bridge. Because shear connectors are buried inside the structure, routine visual inspection is not able to detect conditions of shear connectors. A few methods have been proposed in the literature to detect the condition of shear connectors based on vibration measurements. This paper proposes a different dynamic condition assessment approach to identify the damage of shear connectors in slab-on-girder bridge structures based on power spectral density transmissibility (PSDT). PSDT formulates the relationship between the auto-spectral densities of two responses in the frequency domain. It can be used to identify shear connector conditions with or without reference data of the undamaged structure (or the baseline). Measured impact force and acceleration responses from hammer tests are analyzed to obtain the frequency response functions at sensor locations by experimental modal analysis. PSDT from the slab response to the girder response is derived with the obtained frequency response functions. PSDT vectors in the undamaged and damaged states can be compared to identify the damage of shear connectors. When the baseline is not available, as in most practical cases, PSDT vectors from the measured response at a reference sensor to those of the slab and girder in the damaged state can be used to detect the damage of shear connectors. Numerical and experimental studies on a concrete slab supported by two steel girders are conducted to investigate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed approach. Identification results demonstrate that damages of shear connectors are identified accurately and efficiently with and without the baseline. The proposed method is also used to evaluate the conditions of shear connectors in a real composite bridge with in-field testing data.