Drive-By Identification of Joint Bridge Damage and Surface Roughness Based on Sensitivity Analysis of Residual Contact Point Deflections

Drive-by inspection of bridge damage using a passing vehicle’s dynamic response has great potential in bridge damage identification. Among the current drive-by methodologies, the methods based on bridge modeling have been proposed for the quantitative identification of bridge damage and bridge surface roughness. However, the coupling of bridge damage and unknown surface roughness increases the difficulty of the identification problem and most previous studies conduct the identification task of bridge damage or bridge surface roughness separately. In this paper, a novel method is proposed for the identification of joint bridge damage and bridge surface roughness based on the residual bridge deflections from the front and rear wheels contact points of an instrumented passing vehicle. The vehicle–bridge interaction is analyzed using a half-car model of a four degrees of freedom (4-DOF) with front and rear vehicle wheels. First, the vehicle–bridge unknown forces and displacement of the vehicle axles are identified by the generalized Kalman filter under unknown input (GKF-UI) proposed by the authors. The sensors can be installed conveniently on the vehicle body due to GKF-UI. Then, the residual bridge deflections from the front and rear vehicle wheels contact points are utilized to eliminate the effect of road surface roughness. Afterward, bridge structural damage is identified based on the sensitivity analysis of residual bridge deflections from the front and rear contact points with $l$1-norm regularization. Finally, bridge road surface roughness is estimated based on the identified unknown forces and updated bridge model with damage. The results of numerical identification examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for the identification of joint bridge damage and surface roughness.