Continuous tracking of bridge modal parameters based on subspace correlations.

Summary: Modal parameter variation plays an important role in bridge health monitoring. But tracking the long‐term variation of modal parameters is restricted by the modal identifiability. Since some modes cannot be identified due to the limitations of sensor locations or excitation conditions, the identified modes will be missing or misclassification in the tracking process. In this paper, the multistage tracking technique based on subspace correlations is proposed. To avoid missing the identified modes, the reference mode list should be complete to cover all identified modes. Thus, the first stage is to update the reference list adaptively, where the correlations between the observability vectors of identified modes and the subspaces of existing reference modes are taken. The second stage is to cluster each traceable mode and the specified reference mode together without misclassification, where the modal similarity is measured by the similarity of observability vectors (SOV). The proposed algorithm is verified by the vibration data of a numerical model and a highway bridge, respectively. The results show that the proposed method can link with modes in the same order correctly and update the reference mode list adaptively to avoid missing the identified modes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]