Ambient Vibration Tests of a Steel Footbridge

The paper presents analytical and experimental modal analysis of a steel footbridge for modal parameter identification. 3D finite element model is established for the steel footbridge based on the design drawing and modal parameters are obtained from deformed configurations. The field test is carried out by ambient vibration test under human walking excitation. Both Peak Picking method in the frequency domain and the Stochastic Subspace Identification method in the time domain are used for the output-only modal identification. From the study, good agreement is found between mode shapes, but some differences in the natural frequencies and analytical frequencies are bigger.