Hybrid Damage Monitoring Scheme of PSC Girder Bridges using Acceleration and Impedance Signature

In this paper, a hybrid damage monitoring scheme for prestressed concrete (PSC) girder bridges by using sequential acceleration and impedance signatures is newly proposed. Damage types of interest include prestress-loss in tendon and flexural stiffness-loss in a concrete girder. The hybrid scheme mainly consists of three sequential phases: damage alarming, damage classification, and damage estimation. In the first phase, the global occurrence of damage is alarmed by monitoring changes in acceleration features. In the second phase, the type of damage is classified into either prestress-loss or flexural stiffness-loss by recognizing patterns of impedance features. In the third phase, the location and the extent of damage are estimated by using two different ways: a mode shape-based damage detection to detect flexural stiffness-loss and a natural frequency-based prestress prediction to identify prestress-loss. The feasibility of the proposed scheme is evaluated on a laboratory-scaled PSC girder model for which hybrid vibration-impedance signatures were measured for several damage scenarios of prestress-loss and flexural stiffness-loss.