Experimental and analytical system identification of Eynel arch type steel highway bridge

This paper describes a full scale arch type steel highway bridges, its finite element modelling and Operational Modal Analysis. Eynel Highway Bridge which has arch type structural system with a total length of 336 m and located in the Ayvacik county of Samsun, Turkey is selected as a case study. The bridge connects the villages which are separated with Suat Ugurlu Dam Lake. The three dimensional finite element model is constructed using project drawings and an analytical modal analysis is then performed to generate natural frequencies and mode shapes in the three-orthogonal directions. The ambient vibration tests on the bridge deck under natural excitation such as traffic, human walking and wind loads are conducted using Operational Modal Analysis. Sensitive seismic accelerometers are used to collect signals obtained from the experimental tests. To obtain experimental dynamic characteristics, two output-only system identification methods are employed namely, Enhanced Frequency Domain Decomposition method in the frequency domain and Stochastic Subspace Identification method in time domain. The correlation between the finite element model and experimental results is studied. Good agreement is found between dynamic characteristics in the all measurement test setups performed on the bridge deck. It is demonstrated that the ambient vibration measurements using Enhanced Frequency Domain Decomposition and Stochastic Subspace Identification methods are enough to identify the most significant modes of steel highway bridges. It is seen that there are some differences between analytical and experimental natural frequencies and experimental natural frequencies are generally bigger than the others. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.