Health monitoring of concrete bridges: model simulations of pre-stressed beams under static environmental loading based on experimental data

An experimental program has been conducted in Italy and consists in the continuous monitoring of strains and temperatures, by means of fiber optic sensors, in two pre-stressed concrete beam specimens, placed outdoor and subjected to increasing mechanical damages at different locations. The paper presents the numerical simulations based on these experimental strain measurements. Time histories in the undamaged condition have been generated and the convergence with the strain records has been optimized Damages of different intensities and locations have been introduced into the model, in order to test the Proper Orthogonal Decomposition as a damage detection algorithm on the simulated responses and to compare them with the results obtained from the experimental measurements. The influence of the environmental variations will be examined. A discussion regarding the sensitivity of the applied damage identification methods will be also presented by modeling different damage scenarios.