Time-varying characteristics analysis of vehicle-bridge interaction system based on modified S-transform reassignment technique

The health monitoring of bridge under moving vehicles demands a high-efficient time varying characteristic analysis method to extract the frequency fluctuations caused by vehicle-bridge dynamic interaction effect. Characteristics identification of structures becomes a challenging task especially when time-varying vibration modes are involved. For this purpose, an instantaneous frequency identification technique based on modified S-transform reassignment is presented in this paper. Firstly, the general approximation between structural instantaneous frequency and S-transform is deduced. The Gaussian window is employed in S-transform and a novel first-order frequency function with two parameters is added into the Gaussian window function to improve the time-frequency resolution. The added function makes the Gaussian window scalable-sliding and the optimal values of the parameters are selected based on time-frequency concentration criterion. Considering the R & eacute;nyi entropy as the measurement of criterion, the information performance extracted from S-transform spectrogram is evaluated. Then the time-frequency reassignment technique is applied to improve the readability of S-transform spectrogram to assure the accuracy of the extracted instantaneous characteristics, which enhances the time-frequency concentration efficiently. The proposed method is verified by numerical simulation, the results obtained by the spectrograms derived from short time Fourier transform, wavelet transform, modified S-transform and reassigned modified S-transform are compared. Afterwards, the time-varying frequency components related to the vehicle-bridge interaction are extracted from the response signal. Numerical simulations involving different parameter analysis and laboratory experiments are conducted to validate the flexibility of the technique in vehicle-bridge system. The effect of vehicle weight, speed and road surface roughness on the identified results are discussed. Both numerical and experimental results have demonstrated that a higher time-frequency concentration in the spectrogram can be observed of the proposed modified S-transform reassignment method than other time-frequency methods, and subsequently a higher accuracy of instantaneous frequency identification is achieved which provides a good tool for time-varying characteristic analysis in bridge health monitoring. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

The paper presents an instantaneous frequency identification technique based on modified S-transform reassignment, which improves the time-frequency concentration by adding a first-order frequency function to the Gaussian window function and applying time-frequency reassignment technique. This method efficiently extracts the time-varying characteristics of vehicle-bridge interaction for bridge health monitoring.