Description
Since its first invention in 2004, drive-by Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has been widely adopted to assess ageing infrastructures worldwide. In 2019, the EU Joint Research Centre highlighted it as one of the most promising techniques for the bridge SHM. Recently, a fleet composed of different vehicles has been regarded to be more efficient in obtaining the bridge component in contrast with a sole vehicle, as fleet monitoring can mitigate the annoying impact caused by undesired road components. Conventional fleet monitoring of drive-by SHM builds on instrumented heavy trucks, whereas various mechanical properties of the tested trucks could make it challenging to derive the bridge information for some scenarios, i.e., both the dominant frequency of the vehicle and bridge located within the same range. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel fleet monitoring framework for drive-by SHM, where thousands of buses are generated by utilizing Monte Carlo simulations. Latterly, bridge frequencies are isolated by implemented vehicular transfer functions from the measured bus accelerations for bridge condition assessment. Compared to conventional fleet monitoring, the bus network-based approach has proved to be more efficient because most of the mechanical properties of buses are identical, which further contributes more benefits in bridge information extraction. The proposed bus network-based fleet monitoring of drive-by SHM is validated with laboratory experiments of a scaled highway bridge.
