Damage detection of bridges under environmental temperature changes using a hybrid method

Principal component analysis (PCA)-based method is popular for detecting the damage of bridges under varying environmental temperatures. However, this method deletes some information when the damage features are projected in the direction of nonprincipal components; thus, the effectiveness of PCA-based methods will decrease if the deleted information is related to bridge damage. To address this issue, a hybrid method is proposed to detect the damage of bridges under environmental temperature changes. On one side, the PCA-based method is applied to deal with the nonprincipal components; on the other side, the Gaussian mixture method (GMM) is used to classify all the principal components into different clusters, and then the novel detection method is implemented to detect bridge damage for each cluster. In this way, all the damage feature information is saved and used to detect bridge damage. The numerical example and example of an actual bridge show that the proposed hybrid method is effective in detecting bridge damage under environmental temperature changes. The GMM is effective for classifying the natural monitoring frequency data of actual bridges, and the relationship between the natural frequencies of actual bridges and the environmental temperature is not always linear.