Damage identification of simple supported bridges under moving loads based on variational mode decomposition and deep learning

Aiming at rapid and economical damage detection of a large number of simple supported bridges, a new structural damage identification method under moving load based on variational mode decomposition (VMD) and deep learning is proposed. Firstly, a moving vehicle is used as an exciting load to invoke structural damage feature and enhance the signal-to-noise ratio, and the structural vertical acceleration response is extracted by a finite element simulating analysis under various damage cases. In order to simulate the influence of noise and expand the samples, Gaussian white noise is added to the extracted data, and then the response signal is decomposed into a series of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) using VMD, and the optimal IMF component is selected as the damage sample of the structure. Then, a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN) model is built and trained by the various samples of damage. The vibration response of the practical bridge is processed and inputted by the trained CNN model to identify the location of the damage and degree of the structure. Finally, the effectiveness and anti-noise performance of the proposed method are verified through numerical analysis and a simply supported beam bridge model experiment. The results show that the average identification accuracy of the numerical simulations and experimental is 93.4% and 86.8% with 20% Gaussian white noise, respectively. Sensors at different locations have almost the same identification effect for various cases of damage, so it is possible to identify structural damage only using a small amount of accelerometer.