Structural health monitoring of long-span suspension bridges using wavelet packet analysis

During the service life of civil engineering structures such as long-span bridges, local damage at key positions may continually accumulate, and may finally result in their sudden failure. One core issue of global vibration-based health monitoring methods is to seek some damage indices that are sensitive to structural damage. This paper proposes an online structural health monitoring method for long-span suspension bridges using wavelet packet transform (WPT). The WPT-based method is based on the energy variations of structural ambient vibration responses decomposed using wavelet packet analysis. The main feature of this method is that the proposed wavelet packet energy spectrum (WPES) has the ability to detect structural damage from ambient vibration tests of a long-span suspension bridge. As an example application, the WPES-based health monitoring system is used on the Runyang Suspension Bridge under daily environmental conditions. The analysis reveals that changes in environmental temperature have a long-term influence on the WPES, while the effect of traffic loadings on the measured WPES of the bridge presents instantaneous changes because of the nonstationary properties of the loadings. The condition indication indices V-D reflect the influences of environmental temperature on the dynamic properties of the Runyang Suspension Bridge. The field tests demonstrate that the proposed WPES-based condition indication index V-D is a good candidate index for health monitoring of long-span suspension bridges under ambient excitations.