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Civil-Comp Proceedings
ISSN 1759-3433
CCP: 110
PROCEEDINGS OF THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RAILWAY TECHNOLOGY: RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT AND MAINTENANCE
Edited by: J. Pombo
Paper 139

Fatigue Assessment in Steel Railway Bridges using Output Only Vibration Measurements and Partial Structural Information

V.K. Dertimanis1, E.N. Chatzi1, S. Eftekhar Azam2 and C. Papadimitriou2

1Chair of Structural Mechanics, Institute of Structural Engineering, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
2Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece

Full Bibliographic Reference for this paper
V.K. Dertimanis, E.N. Chatzi, S. Eftekhar Azam, C. Papadimitriou, "Fatigue Assessment in Steel Railway Bridges using Output Only Vibration Measurements and Partial Structural Information", in J. Pombo, (Editor), "Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Railway Technology: Research, Development and Maintenance", Civil-Comp Press, Stirlingshire, UK, Paper 139, 2016. doi:10.4203/ccp.110.139
Keywords: fatigue life estimation, steel bridge, vibration response, unscented Kalman filter.

Summary
A novel methodological framework for the online fatigue lifetime assessment of steel railway bridges is presented in this paper. By adopting a simply supported beam model amenable to a moving force at a constant velocity, the framework presumes the availability of noise-corrupted structural vibration acceleration response measurements and formulates an online estimator that identifies the unknown (i) excitation force, (ii) structural information, which herein pertains to the modal damping ratio, and (iii) modal displacements and velocities. The estimated information is subsequently applied to the calculation of stresses in both measured and unmeasured locations and, thus, to the residual fatigue life estimation of the structure. The numerical results provide a significant indication of effectiveness and suggest further investigation.

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