Experimental study on bridge structural health monitoring using blind source separation method: arch bridge

A new output only modal analysis method is developed in this paper. This method uses continuous wavelet transform to modify a popular blind source separation algorithm, second order blind identification (SOBI). The wavelet modified SOBI (WMSOBI) method replaces original time domain signal with selected time-frequency domain wavelet coefficients, which overcomes the shortcomings of SOBI. Both numerical and experimental studies on bridge models are carried out when there are limited number of sensors. Identified modal properties from WMSOBI are analyzed and compared with fast Fourier transform (FFT), SOBI and eigensystem realization algorithm (ERA). The comparison shows WMSOBI can identify as many results as FFT and ERA. Further case study of structural health monitoring (SHM) on an arch bridge verifies the capability to detect damages by combining WMSOBI with incomplete flexibility difference method.