ABSTRACT
This paper preliminarily investigates the practicability of a damage detection technique utilizing the statistical patterns of modal parameters to a real simply-supported steel truss bridge. The modal parameters are identified from the vehicle-excited bridge vibrations via the Stability Diagram-aided Multivariate Autoregressive analysis. The damage detection task is achieved using the Mahalanobis-Taguchi System (MTS), a multivariate pattern-recognition tool. Several combinations of modal parameters serving as MTS variables are tested for their efficiency. It is concluded that multiple modal frequencies are considered as effective MTS variable combinations, since they yield highly sensitive MD to not only the presence but also the severity of the artificial damage; single frequency is not as effective as multiple frequencies, yielding sensitive MD to certain specific damage scenarios only; damping ratios are the least effective variables.
