A Drive-By Methodology for Rapid Inspection of HSR Bridge Substructures Using Dynamic Responses of Passing Marshaling Trains

Drive-by methods hold tremendous potential for fast inspection and condition evaluation of bridges. However, most literature works focused on the bridge superstructures, and the applications of drive-by approaches to the substructures are quite rare. This paper numerically investigates the feasibility of detecting the damage in high-speed railway (HSR) bridge substructures using measured bogie acceleration responses from the passing marshaling trains. A damage indicator is developed as the work done by the change of the interaction force before and after damage when the vehicle passes through a pier. The interaction forces between the vehicle bogies and wheel-sets are estimated by a dual Kalman filter (DKF) from the dynamic responses of passing vehicles. A rapid inspection methodology is proposed for the interaction force identification and damage detection based on the coupling vehicle-girder-pier-foundation model. Parametric studies are conducted to investigate the influence of some factors on the proposed methodology. The results from this study indicate that the interaction forces and vehicle state can be well identified by the DKF algorithm, and the defined damage indicator is reliable for damage localization and indication of the damage level using vehicles travelling at a high speed. The proposed method shows good robustness to the pier damage combinations, vehicle parameters and track irregularity and can serve as an effective drive-by health monitoring strategy for HSR or even normal speed railway bridge substructures.