Characterization of non-stationary properties of vehicle–bridge response for structural health monitoring

Abstract

Quantifying the non-stationary properties of bridge under passing vehicle has been an important topic in structural health monitoring of bridge. There are many methods of time–frequency representation used for the study of dynamics of bridge under passing vehicle, including spectrogram, wavelet, Hilbert–Huang transform, and so on. This article uses adaptive optimal kernel time–frequency representation to quantify the non-stationary properties of the response of bridge under passing vehicle and illustrates and discusses its advantages over conventional time–frequency methods.