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Accepted Manuscript
International Journal of Structural Stability and Dynamics
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Article Title: Time-varying parameter identification of bridges subject to moving vehi-

cles using ridge extraction based on empirical wavelet transform

Author(s): Jiantao Li, Jian Guo, Xinqun Zhu

DOI: 10.1142/S0219455421500462

Received: 10 August 2020

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Accepted: 26 November 2020

To be cited as: Jiantao Li, Jian Guo, Xinqun Zhu, Time-varying parameter identification
of bridges subject to moving vehicles using ridge extraction based on
empirical wavelet transform, International Journal of Structural Stability
and Dynamics, doi: 10.1142/S0219455421500462

Link to final version: https://doi.org/10.1142/S0219455421500462

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Time-varying parameter identification of bridges subject to moving vehicles
using ridge extraction based on empirical wavelet transform

Jiantao Lia , Jian Guoa,* and Xinqun Zhub

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a
Institute of Bridge Engineering, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou 310000, Zhejiang,
China. Email: [email protected]
b
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Technology Sydney, Broadway, NSW
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2007, Australia

Abstract

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For a vehicle moving over a bridge, the vehicle-bridge interaction (VBI) embraces the time-varying
modal parameters of the system. The identification of non-stationary characteristics of bridge responses
due to moving vehicle load is important and remains a challenging task. A new method based on the
improved empirical wavelet transform (EWT) along with ridge detection of signals in time-frequency
representation (TFR) is proposed to estimate the instantaneous frequencies (IFs) of the bridge.

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Numerical studies are conducted using a VBI model to investigate the time-varying characteristics of
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the system. The effects of the measurement noise, road surface roughness and structural damage on the
bridge IFs are investigated. Finally, the dynamic responses of an in-situ cable-stayed bridge subjected
to a passing vehicle are analyzed to further explore the time varying characteristics of the VBI system.
Numerical and experimental studies demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed
method on the IF estimation. The identified IFs reveal important time-varying characteristics of the
bridge dynamics that is significant to evaluating the actual performance of operational bridges in
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operation and may be used for structural health assessment.

Keywords: damage, vehicle-bridge interaction, instantaneous frequency, empirical wavelet transform,

time-frequency representation, ridge detection, surface roughness

1. Introduction
The investigation on the bridge dynamic characteristics under operational traffic load is a
significant part of the bridge structural health monitoring. Extensive study on the bridge dynamic
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characteristics has been conducted in a VBI framework1-4. Research shows that the VBI is a time-
varying process that the dynamic responses of the bridge are non-stationary5,6. Li et al.7 theoretically
studied the natural frequency of railway girder bridges under vehicular load. The bridge frequency was
found varying periodically with the passage of the vehicle. Kim et al.8 experimentally studied the effect
of vehicle weight on the bridge natural frequencies under traffic-induced excitation. A non-negligible
change 5.4% was noted in the natural frequencies of a short span bridge when the mass ratio between
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the vehicle and the bridge was 3.8%. Chang et al.9 conducted theoretical and experimental studies to
estimate the variability of bridge frequency due to a vehicle parked on top. Yang et al. 10 firstly
identified the instantaneous frequencies of bridge from the moving vehicle responses. The literature11
presented state-of-the-art review of the vehicle-based methods for detecting the different modal
parameters of highway bridges. Cantero et al. 12 assessed the non-stationary and non-linear features of a
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scaled vehicle-bridge interaction test bed experimentally. The identification of the time-varying
dynamic characteristics is critical to accurately assess the structural performance and condition of
target structure13. The time-varying parameter identification of bridges under moving vehicle loads is
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still a big challenge.
Non-parametric based time-frequency analysis techniques, i.e. short time Fourier transform
(STFT), Winger-Ville distribution (WVD), Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) and wavelet
transform, are extensively used to study dynamic characteristics of non-stationary structural

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responses14,15. Yang et al.16 briefly reviewed these methods and their engineering applications. For
STFT, the time-frequency representation is determined by the window function and the resolutions are
fixed that may result in a deficiency in extracting accurate time-frequency characteristics from non-
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stationary signals. The time-frequency representation based on continuous wavelet transform is a trade-
off between time-frequency resolutions, while the results of WVD are affected by the cross-terms in the
instantaneous auto-correlation function. EMD and the ensemble EMD become one of the most popular

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techniques to analyze non-stationary and non-linear dynamic response signals. It decomposes a signal
into a finite sum of Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) and Hilbert transform (HT) is then used to extract
the instantaneous modal frequencies from IMFs. However, the EMD suffers from the problems of
mode mixture and pseudo-IMFs and the issue of its lack of mathematical theory. The synchrosqueezing
transform (SST), an EMD-like tool, was recently proposed to analyze the non-stationary signals17,18.

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SST based methods have been developed for the time-frequency analysis and have presented better
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estimation results over EMD19,20. However, the SST method uses a classic wavelet analysis instead of a
full adaptive wavelet transform. Gills21 developed the Empirical Wavelet Transform (EWT) based on
wavelet decomposition. EWT is an adaptive approach for conveniently extracting the different modes
of a signal by constructing a wavelet filter bank. The results have shown its feasibility and
effectiveness compared to the classic EMD. It has been successfully applied to machinery fault
diagnosis22-24. Kedadoucheet al.25 compared the EWT and EMD methods in the application to the
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bearing effect diagnosis. The results showed that the EWT was much efficient compared to EMD and
Ensemble EMD on mode estimates and computation time. Recently, EWT was applied to identify
modal parameters of civil structures26. Xia and Zhou27 adopted EWT to obtain the mono-component of
structural response and employed Hilbert transform to extract the time-varying features for condition
assessment of civil structures.
The EWT approach is to extract the different modes by designing the appropriate wavelet filter
bank and provides a consistent decomposition. To authors’ best knowledge, there is a little research on
using or improving EWT method for time-varying parameter identification, especially for vehicle-
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bridge interaction systems. Xin et al. 28 has been successfully applied the improved EWT for
operational modal identification of linear structures. This method is enhanced using the time-frequency
analysis based on Synchroextracting transform to determine the filtering boundaries of EWT29. The
results showed that the EWT is more reliable and accurate in identifying the time-varying components
of the signal than that by the variational mode decomposition 30. The experimental results showed the
potential application to track the passage of the heavy vehicles on the bridge29. There is no detail study
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for time-varying characteristics of bridges subjected moving vehicles. This study is to develop a new
method by integrating the wavelet ridge extraction and improved EWT to identify the time-varying
parameter of the vehicle-bridge system.
This paper proposes a hybrid framework based on an improved EWT for the analysis of non-
stationary bridge responses under operational vehicle load and extracting instantaneous frequencies.
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The framework involves two steps. In the first step, an improved EWT is used to decompose the
measured bridge responses into a number of IMFs. The second step is to extract instantaneous
frequencies from the time-frequency represents (TFR) of IMFs by ridge detection. Section 2 of this
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Figure 5 Comparison between the identified IFs and theoretical values

4.2 Moving vehicle case

For more practical study, a vehicle model with parameters 𝑚𝑣 = 4500kg, 𝑚1 = 1500kg, 𝑘𝑡 =

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2.00𝑒4N/m, 𝑘𝑠 = 5𝑒5N/m and 𝑐𝑠 = 5000 N/m/s is adopted. The bounce frequency of vehicle body
vibration is 0.33Hz and 2.96Hz is for the axle mass vibration, respectively. The moving speed is 10m/s
with sampling frequency 200Hz. The feasibility of the proposed study is illustrated with numerical
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results with consideration of different possible effects in practice, e.g. measurement noise, road surface
roughness, etc. The values selected for these parameters are realistic with reference to similar published
research studies in VBI39. The effects of the road surface roughness and damage on the time varying

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modal properties of the bridge are considered in the VBI model as shown in Eq. (4), where 𝑟(𝑥(𝑡)) is
the road surface roughness and the damage is simulated as the stiffness reduction in bridge stiffness
matrix in Eq. (3). The white noise is added to the calculated bridge responses from Eq. (4) to simulate
the measurements using Eq.(17) . These factors will affect the bridge dynamic responses s(t) in
Eqs.(10) and (11). Therefore, the measurement noise, surface roughness and damage are the key factors

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to consider their effects on the time varying properties of the VBI system.The dynamic response of the
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bridge is calculated, and 10% white noise is added to simulate the measurement. By using the
constructed filter bank, the empirical modes in dynamic responses s(t) are extracted.

4.2.1 Comparison of IF estimation using different methods

The dynamic response of the bridge under a moving vehicle is analyzed when the bridge road
surface is smooth. The instantaneous frequencies are extracted from the bridge response using the
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proposed method and compared with that by SST and HT. Figure 6 shows the signal decomposition
results using EWT. In Figure 6(a), three dominant peaks in the spectrum are corresponding to the
bridge modal frequencies, while the vehicle-related frequency is invisible. The local maxima in the
spectrum can be successfully used to detect the boundary. The signal is decomposed by EWT and the
bridge vibrationrelated three components are extracted as shown in Figure 6(b). The IFs identified for
the moving vehicle case are shown in Figure 7 and the results are compared with those of moving mass
case. It can be seen that the amplitude of bridge frequency variation under moving vehicle is smaller
than that of moving mass. Figure 8 compares the identified IFs using the proposed method with that by
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SST and HT. For comparison, only the identified 1st and 2nd bridge modal frequencies are presented in
Figure 8. The results indicate that the identified IFs from three different methods present a similar
variation trend and the proposed method outperforms the other two methods in regard to the resolution.
The rest of the study focuses on the identified IFs results.
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Amplitude

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0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
Frequency / Hz

(a) Spectrum of the response and identified boundaries

Component 1
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-0.01
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3
-3 Component 2
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Amplitude

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0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3

-3 Component 3
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Time/ Sec

(b) First three components

Figure 6 Signal decomposition using improved EWT
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(a) IFs of first mode

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(b) IFs of second mode

Figure 8 Estimated IFs of bridge response using three different methods

4.2.2 Effect of measurement noise

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The effects of measurement noise on the identification of the IFs using the proposed method are
studied. Another two additional noise levels, i.e. 15% and 20% are included to the calculated bridge
responses. The IF trajectories identified from the responses are given in Figure 9. In this figure, it can
be seen that the identified IF trajectories related to vehicle frequency and 1st bridge modal frequency
are very close for different noise levels. For the IF trajectory of the 2nd bridge modal frequency, there is
an obvious difference in the identified results. The difference can be caused by the effect of the driving
frequency. Thus, the modal frequency of higher modes may present higher difference due to the effect
of noise.
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Figure 9 Estimated IFs considering different measurement noise

4.2.3 Effect of bridge surface roughness

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A Class A bridge road surface roughness40 as shown in Figure 10 is introduced in the numerical
model and the bridge response is calculated. The proposed method is used to extract the IFs of the
response and the identified results are given in Figure 11. It is illustrated that the bridge surface
roughness changes the variation trend of the response and amplifies the variation amplitude. Therefore,
for the VBI based bridge health monitoring, the effects of the roughness should be considered carefully.
By considering the case when 20% measurement is included, it can be seen that the effect of road
surface roughness on the IFs results is more prominent than that of measurement noise.
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Bridge surface roughness/ m
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-1
0 5 10 15 20 25 30
Location along the bridge deck/ m

Figure 10 The class A bridge surface roughness

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Figure 11 IFs estimation when bridge surface roughness is considered

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4.3 Beam with crack damage

A crack is introduced to the bridge model to simulate the bridge structural damage. According to
Sinha et al.41, the crack damage causes a linearly varying decrease in flexural stiffness in its vicinity.
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The crack is assumed at the 1/3 span of the bridge with the crack level 10% and 20% of the overall
bridge cross-section depth, respectively. Bridge response is analyzed to extract the IFs. From the results
as shown in Figure 12, the bridge frequencies decrease due to the crack damage. The results confirmed
that the change of the frequency can be used for damage detection. However, the identified IFs do not

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give information on the damage location.
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Figure 12 IFs estimation when bridge is damaged

5. IF estimation of the response of an actual bridge

A long-term monitoring system has been installed on a cable-stayed bridge as shown in Figure
13(a). It is a single lane highway bridge with a span of 46m and a width of 5m. The bridge connects the
South and North campuses of Western Sydney University inNewSouthWales. There are 24
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accelerometers installed on the bridge deck, and Figures 13(b) indicates the sensor locations. A data
acquisition system continuously records the data from sensors with a sampling rate of 600Hz. Sun et
al.42 conducted modal identification using a series of bridge responses under ambient excitation. The
identified first eight modal frequencies are summarized in Table 1.
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(a) The cable-stayed bridge

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(b) Sensor location

Figure 13 Long-term monitoring of a cable-stayed bridge

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The vehicle-induced response of the bridge is studied. Figure 14 shows the acceleration response
at sensor A10 and its spectrum when a vehicle is passing over the bridge. Both the wavelet SST and the
proposed methods are used to analyze the signal. Figure 15(a) shows the AR power spectrum and the
identified boundaries. The identified IFs using the proposed method are shown in Figure 15(b) and the
IFs extracted using SST are given in Figure 15(c). For comparison, the estimated IFs results from a
recent study43 is also presented in Figure 15(d). As Shown in Figure 15(b), the first five IFs are
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estimated by the proposed method. The associated bridge vibration mode of the IFs is indicated in the
figure. The IFs of first vertical bending mode and the coupled Mode 2 and 3 are very similar to the
results from SST and reference as shown in Figures 15(c) and (d), respectively. The identified IFs of
coupled 6 and 7 mode fromthreemethods are alsocomparable.Moreover, the results of the proposed
method and that from the reference give the time-varying dynamic information related to the coupled
Mode 4 and 5. It is demonstrated that the proposed method successfully reveals more time-varying
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characteristics related to the vehicle-induced bridge response than that from the other methods.

Table 1 The identified bridge modal frequencies via modal analysis

Mode number Frequency (Hz) Vibration mode
1 2.032 First vertical bending mode of the deck
2 3.548 Double mode that corresponds to the second vertical
3 3.649 bending mode
4 5.584 Third bending mode
5 6.136 A mixture of torsion and bending modes
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6 8.044 A mixture of torsion and bending modes

7 8.671 A mixture of torsion and bending modes
8 11.561 A mixture of torsion and bending modes
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(c) IFs estimation using SST

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(d) IFs estimation from reference43

Figure 15 The estimation of IFs of bridge response

6. Conclusions
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The identification of time-varying characteristics of vehicle-induced bridge dynamic response is a

complex yet important task. This paper focuses on the vehicle-bridge interaction system and proposes a
hybrid method for the analysis of the non-stationary bridge responses. The method combines the
improved empirical wavelet transform and a TFR ridge detection technique to extract the IFs.
Numerical and experimental studies are conducted, and their results verified the feasibility and
effectiveness of the proposed method comparing with some commonly used methods. The
implementation of the proposed method to the response of an in-situ bridge reveals the important time-
dependent evolution information of the bridge dynamic characteristics due to the moving operational
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vehicle load. In this study, the beam bridge is the main focus and it could be simplified as a 2-D
vehicle-bridge interaction model. A 3-D vehicle-bridge interaction model is the future work to be
conducted when the torsional mode of the bridge deck is critical.

Acknowledgements
This research is supported in part by research funding of the Postdoctoral Research Project of Zhejiang
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Province (ZJ2020024), the National Key Research and Development Projects (2018YFC0809604) and
the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U1709207). The financial aid is gratefully
acknowledged. DATA61 is greatly acknowledged for the instrumentation of the field bridge for
monitoring.
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References
1. Kim, J.H., Lynch, J.P., 2013. Experimental analysis of vehicle-bridge interaction using a wireless
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