Structural Identification: A Tool for Bridge Reliability Evaluation
 

Sara Wadia-Fascetti, Assistant Professor, NU
Burcu Gunes, Graduate Student, NU

Emin Aktan, John Roebling Professor, DU
Michael Lennett, Doctoral Candidate, UC

Masoud Sanayei, Associate Professor, TU
Behnam Arya, Graduate Student, TU

Arthur Helmicki, Associate Professor, UC
Ann Wilson, Graduate Student, UC
 

ABSTRACT

An integrated approach to Structural-Identification (St-Id) is presented.  The results obtained from St-Id are discussed from a reliability point of view and the need for a service reliability index is suggested.  Before the results obtained from the parameter estimation can be used to estimate service reliability, the quality of the process and the results from St-Id need to be understood.  The process, which integrates experimental and analytical approaches, is presented in six general steps.  Issues related to the compatibility between the experimental objectives and the analytical needs for convergence to acceptable results are discussed.  Uncertainty contributions at each step of the integrated process cause the error or noise on measured response to propagate.  It is paramount that the final noise level in the measured response is less than the acceptable noise level for the analytical parameter estimation to converge to structural parameters within acceptable error bounds.  A preliminary investigation is presented to identify the sources of error, their magnitude, and the effect on the output response.  Results are given for a physical model tested in the laboratory.  Three static tests and three dynamic tests are performed and the variability in the results is calculated.  Future efforts to quantify the experimental errors are outlined.
 

Contact Information:

Prof. S. Wadia-Fascetti (swf@neu.edu)
Dept. of Civil & Env. Engineering
Northeastern University
Boston, MA  02115

Reference:

Wadia-Fascetti, S., Gunes†, B., Aktan, A. E., Lennett†, M., Sanayei, M., Arya†, B., Helmicki, A., and Wilson†, A. (1998) "Structural Identification: A Tool for Bridge Reliability Evaluation." Paper Number T216-4.  World Structures Congress, San Francisco, July 1998.

NU: Northeastern University
DU: Drexel University
TU: Tufts University
UC: University of Cincinnati
 

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