A statistical comparison of impact and ambient testing results from the Alamosa Canyon Bridge

Abstract

In this paper, the modal properties of the Alamosa Canyon Bridge obtained using ambient data are compared to those obtained from impact hammer vibration tests. Using ambient sources of excitation to determine the modal characteristics of large civil engineering structures is desirable for several reasons. The forced vibration testing of such structures generally requires a large amount of specialized equipment and trained personnel making the tests quite expensive. Also, an automated health monitoring system for a large civil structure will most likely use ambient excitation. A modal identification procedure based on a statistical Monte Carlo analysis using the Eigensystem Realization Algorithm is used to compute the modal parameters and their statistics. The results show that for most of the measured modes, the differences between the modal frequencies of the ambient and hammer data sets are statistically significant. However, the differences between the corresponding damping ratio results are not statistically significant. Also, one of the modes identified from the hammer test data was not identifiable from the ambient data set.