Using measured rotation in a beam to detect changes in its structural condition

A recent survey of Europe’s highway infrastructure has concluded that almost half of Europe’s bridges are nearing the end of their design live. Work in the wider Structural Health Monitoring sector is aiming to develop reliable and cost-effective methods for verifying condition, remaining service life and safety of ageing structures. Most bridge condition assessment methods are based on deflection, acceleration or strain measurements. This paper looks at the possibility of using rotation measurements as a main parameter to identify damage. This study looks at numerical analyses of a moving point load on a one-dimensional bridge model to provide the theoretical basis of the proposed damage detection method. It is shown that when local damage occurs, even when it is remote from a sensor location, it results in an increase in the magnitude of rotation measurements. This study looks at how best to exploit this fact for damage detection. A number of damage scenarios, sensor locations, and load arrangements are investigated in this study and their influence on the ability of the algorithm to detect damage are reported.