Laboratory Investigation on Detecting Bridge Scour Using the Indirect Measurement from a Passing Vehicle

For bridges with surface foundations, scour is one of the main reasons for bridge failures. In regard to structural health monitoring, vibration-based scour detection techniques have received increasing attention over the past two decades. Scour occurs below the water surface in rivers or sea, leadi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inRemote sensing (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 14; no. 13; p. 3106
Main Authors Zhang, Bin, Zhao, Hua, Tan, Chengjun, OBrien, Eugene J., Fitzgerald, Paul C., Kim, Chul-Woo
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.07.2022
Subjects
Bridge failure
Bridge foundations
bridge scour
Energy
Experiments
Floods
indirect measurement
Laboratories
Mathematical models
Methods
Remote sensing
Scour
Scouring
Sensors
SHM
Signal processing
Soil erosion
Structural health monitoring
Traffic speed
vehicle and bridge interaction
Vehicles
Velocity
Vibration
Vibration monitoring
wavelet energy
Wavelet transforms
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Summary:For bridges with surface foundations, scour is one of the main reasons for bridge failures. In regard to structural health monitoring, vibration-based scour detection techniques have received increasing attention over the past two decades. Scour occurs below the water surface in rivers or sea, leading to difficulty in equipment installation and maintenance. Recently, the concept of “drive-by” SHM using the indirect measurement of passing vehicle responses has been developed rapidly due to its convenience and low cost. This paper proposes a method to detect scour using the vehicle responses under an operational vehicle speed. The wavelet transform was applied to vehicle accelerations to obtain the wavelet energy. It was found that the wavelet energy increases with the increase in the scour damage level. However, the wavelet energy may also be affected by the on-site operating environments, such as sensor noise and other variabilities, which interferes with the identification of scour in practice. Hence, in this work, a statistical-wavelet-based approach was presented to effectively detect the presence of scour and even its location. The feasibility of the proposed approach is verified in both numerical simulation and lab experiments. The results show that the proposed method has a good potential to detect scour using indirect measurements.
ISSN:2072-4292
2072-4292
DOI:10.3390/rs14133106