A multi-way data analysis approach for structural health monitoring of a cable-stayed bridge

A large-scale cable-stayed bridge in the state of New South Wales, Australia, has been extensively instrumented with an array of accelerometer, strain gauge, and environmental sensors. The real-time continuous response of the bridge has been collected since July 2016. This study aims at condition assessment of this bridge by investigating three aspects of structural health monitoring including damage detection, damage localization, and damage severity assessment. A novel data analysis algorithm based on incremental multi-way data analysis is proposed to analyze the dynamic response of the bridge. This method applies incremental tensor analysis for data fusion and feature extraction, and further uses one-class support vector machine on this feature to detect anomalies. A total of 15 different damage scenarios were investigated; damage was physically simulated by locating stationary vehicles with different masses at various locations along the span of the bridge to change the condition of the bridge. The effect of damage on the fundamental frequency of the bridge was investigated and a maximum change of 4.4% between the intact and damage states was observed which corresponds to a small severity damage. Our extensive investigations illustrate that the proposed technique can provide reliable characterization of damage in this cable-stayed bridge in terms of detection, localization and assessment. The contribution of the work is threefold; first, an extensive structural health monitoring system was deployed on a cable-stayed bridge in operation; second, an incremental tensor analysis was proposed to analyze time series responses from multiple sensors for online damage identification; and finally, the robustness of the proposed method was validated using extensive field test data by considering various damage scenarios in the presence of environmental variabilities.