O uso do GPS como instrumento de controle de deslocamentos dinâmicos de obras civis - aplicação na área de transportes

LAROCCA, A. P. C. (2004). The Use of GPS as Control Instrument of Dynamic Displacements of Civil Structures Application in the Transportation Area. Ph.D. Thesis – Escola de Engenharia de São Carlos, Universidade de São Paulo, São Carlos, 2004. This work presents the development of a methodology to appraise the use of Global Positioning System (GPS) as a tool for researching of dynamic behavior of road transport structures. To be characterized as an instrument for measuring it was studied the potentiality of one method which includes a specific mode of GPS data collection; analyses of double difference phase residuals and application of spectral analyses and filtering for excluding undesirable information (multipath). The GPS data collected applies an electro-mechanical oscillator, specially built for that, which permits to calibrate the measures of frequency and amplitude of structure’s oscillations under dynamic load test. Several field tests were carried out in vicinities with high and low capacity of causing signal reflections and diffractions and with different types of GPS receivers and GPS antennas. A couple of fields were carried out using, at the same time, transducers of displacement, accelerometers and total stations. Comparing these results obtained even with values of codes, it is affirmed that GPS, under the data collection method tested, it is a trustworthy instrument for detection and characterization of dynamic behavior of structures, presenting reliability of measures ranging around tenths of millimeters. The very low frequencies are highly degraded by multipath and very high frequencies have its detection limited by the receiver data rate (Theorem’s Nyquist).