A multi-scale sensing and diagnosis system combining accelerometers and gyroscopes for bridge health monitoring

This paper presents a multi-scale sensing and diagnosis system combining accelerometers and gyroscopes for bridge health monitoring. Since the damage metric estimated from acceleration measurement is insensitive to damage near the hinged support of a bridge, the damage diagnosis performance is limited near the support region. However, the performance can be improved by using two or more complementary data measured from multi-scale sensing. To more effectively diagnose the integrity of an overall bridge structure, angular velocity is complementary to acceleration, because of its high sensitivity to damage near the hinged support. This study proposes a multi-scale sensing and diagnosis system for bridge health monitoring based on a two-step approach. First, the damage diagnosis based on acceleration measurement is performed on the whole structure by using deflection estimated by modal flexibility. Next, the angular-velocity-based damage diagnosis is additionally carried out to localize missed damage by the acceleration-based approach near the hinged support. For validating the feasibility of the proposed system, a series of numerical and experimental studies on a simply supported beam model was performed. It was found that the multiple damages (one is near the center and another is near the support) can be successfully localized by the proposed multi-scale sensing and diagnosis system, while the damage near the support was missed by a conventional damage metric estimated from acceleration measurements.