• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.29 no.1A
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• pp.61-73
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• 2009

In this paper, hybrid health monitoring techniques using acceleration-impedance features are newly proposed to detect two damage-type in steel plate-girder bridges, which are girder's stiffness-loss and support perturbation. The hybrid techniques mainly consists of three sequential phases: 1) to alarm the occurrence of damage in global manner, 2) to classify the alarmed damage into subsystems of the structure, and 3) to estimate the classified damage in detail using methods suitable for the subsystems. In the first phase, the global occurrence of damage is alarmed by monitoring changes in acceleration features. In the second phase, the alarmed damage is classified into subsystems by recognizing patterns of impedance features. In the final phase, the location and the extent of damage are estimated by using modal strain energy-based damage index method and root mean square deviation (RMSD) method. The feasibility of the proposed hybrid technique is evaluated on a laboratory-scaled steel plate-girder bridge model for which hybrid acceleration-impedance signatures were measured for several damage scenarios. Also, the effect of temperature on the accuracy of the impedance-based damage monitoring results are experimentally examined from combined scenarios of support damage cases and temperature changes.