Experimental dynamic assessment of civil infrastructures

Abstract

This chapter describes in a concise and systematic manner most relevant aspects relatedto the dynamic testing and continuous monitoring of large-scale civil infrastructure.This involves an extensive discussion of modern perspectives concerning testing tech-niques, instrumentation, modal identification, vibration serviceability safety checking,damage detection and wind induced effects. Special attention is given to the imple-mentation of automated versions of the most powerful methods of Operational ModalAnalysis, and their application for tracking the time evolution of modal parametersin long-term dynamic monitoring applications, as well as to the application of sta-tistical methods to remove the influence of environmental and operational factors(e.g., temperature, intensity of traffic, wind) on the modal variability, supporting thedevelopment of reliable techniques for vibration based damage detection.