Subspace-based Damage Detection Methods on a Prestressed Concrete Bridge

For the last decades vibration based damage detection of engineering structures has become an important issue for maintenance operations on transport infrastructure. Research in vibration based structural damage detection has been rapidly expanding from classic modal parameter estimation to modern operational monitoring. Methodologies from control engineering especially of aerospace applications have been adopted and converted for the application on civil structures. Here the difficulty is to regard to the specific environmental and operational influence to the structure under observation. A null space based damage detection algorithm is tested for its sensitivity to structural damage of a prestressed concrete road bridge. Specific techniques and extensions of the algorithm are used to overcome difficulties from the size of the structure which is associated with the number of recorded sensor channels as well as from the operational disturbances by a nearby construction site. It can be shown that for concrete bridges the proposed damage detection methodology is able to clearly indicate the presence of structural damage, if the damage leads to a significant change of the structural system. Small damage which do not result in a system change when not activated by loading, do not lead to a modification of the dynamic response behavior and for that cannot be detected with the proposed global monitoring method.