Damage assessment of concrete structures through dynamic testing methods. Part 1 – Laboratory tests

The present paper is split into two parts: Part 1 is about laboratory tests whereas the second part deals with experiments on real bridges. This article aims at summarizing several experimental dynamic testing methods with different damage indicators to evaluate the state of prestressed as well as of passively reinforced concrete structures. First the differences between prestressed and passively reinforced concrete are repeated for static behavior, before the transition to dynamics is made. As it will be proved in the following that the amount of nonlinearities increases with damage, harmonic excitation is favorable to realize good testing conditions. It is applied to visualize variations in linear as well as in non-linear structural characteristics, which are subsequently used as damage indicators, e.g. the drop of the eigenfrequencies, the changes in damping and modeshapes, the occurrence of higher harmonics and a varying dependency of the eigenfrequency on excitation force amplitude. These different indicators will be used on passively reinforced beam elements and industrially produced prestressed slabs in the first part and on two real post-tensioned bridges in the second part. All these structures were in good order and condition before artificial damage was applied in multiple steps and the sensitivity of each damage indicator was analyzed.