ABSTRACT
Environmental based perturbations influence significantly the ability to identify structural damage in Structural Health Monitoring. Strategies are needed to classify such effects and consider them appropriately in SHM. It has to be considered if seasonal effects just mask the structural response or if temperature itself correlates to a weakening of the structure. Various methods have been developed and analyzed to separate environmental based effects from damage induced changes in the measures. Generally, two main approaches have emerged from research activity in this fields: (a) statistics-based tools analyzing patterns in the data or in computed parameters and (b) methods, utilizing the structural model of the bridge considering environmental as well as damage-based changes of stiffness values. With the background of increasing affordability of sensing and computing technology, effort should be made to increase sensitivity, reliability and robustness of procedures, separating environmental from damage caused changes in SHM measures. The contribution describes an attempt to evaluate both general strategies, their advantages and drawbacks. In addition, two vibration monitoring procedures are introduced, allowing for temperature-based perturbations of the monitoring data.
