Considering Wave Passage Effects in Blind Identification of Long-Span Bridges

Long-span bridges usually experience different input excitations at their ground supports that emanate from differences in wave arrival times, and soil conditions, as well as loss of coherency in arriving waves. These spatial variations can drastically influence the dynamic response; hence, this phenomenon must be considered in any vibration-based identification method. There are numerous Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) identification techniques that may be applied to data recorded at long-span bridges that experience spatial variations in their input motions. However, inertial soil-structure interaction effect severely reduces the accuracy of these techniques because the actual Foundation Input Motion (FIM) cannot be recorded during earthquakes. In this study, we present an extension to a novel blind identification method that we had developed earlier, which enables the method to handle multiple input motions. For the sake of simplicity, we only consider wave passage effects—that is, all unknown input motions are assumed to be identical except for a known/unknown phase-delay. This method comprises two steps. In the first step, the spatial time-frequency distributions of recorded responses are used for extracting the mode shapes and the modal coordinates. This is achieved through a Blind Source Separation (BSS) technique. In the second step, cross relations among the extracted modal coordinates are used for identifying the natural frequencies, damping ratios, modal contribution factors, along with the unknown input motions through a least-squares technique. Both simulated and experimental examples are provided, which suggest that the method is capable of accurately identifying the dynamic characteristics of long-span bridges from recorded response signals without the knowledge of input motions, even in the presence of wave passage effects emanating from known/unknown phase-delays.