Abstract Summary
Damage to bridges is related to road safety and traffic disruption, therefore to substantial direct and indirect economic losses. Hence, there is an urgent need for development and application of systems that can assess the structural condition of bridges. In this study, a methodology for damage identification utilizing measured vibrational data of the initial and the damaged response of a monitored R/C bridge system is proposed. In this context, a finite element model is developed, and calibration of its parameters is performed by applying optimization algorithms to match the numerical to the measured data . The same procedure is applied for the estimation of the model parameters of the damaged structure, in order to identify, localize and quantify damage. Capacity curves are developed for both the calibrated and the damaged bridge and a dimensionless damage indicator is introduced to assess the effect of the identified damage on the global response of the bridge. This approach is applied to a case study monolithic R/C bridge and simulated experiments (e.g. damage scenarios) are conducted to demonstrate the proposed methodology.
