Cumulative displacement-based detection of damper malfunction in bridges using data-driven isolation forest algorithm

Long-span cable-supported bridges are flexible and prone to significant deformations under temperature, wind, and vehicle loads. Such large deformations induce frequent longitudinal movement at the end of the bridge girder, which can cause malfunction or failure in the components such as expansion joints, bearings, or longitudinal viscous dampers. This paper develops a condition assessment approach using the girder end displacement measurements, which primarily includes four steps, namely, data preprocessing, feature characterization, datasets preparation and splitting, and anomaly detection. The data preprocessing step considers the physics-based correlation between the temperature and displacement, which is used to pre-check noisy data issues in the displacement monitoring data. Subsequently, hourly cumulative displacement is calculated as the feature to feed into the machine learning model. The third step prepares the datasets and splits them into training and testing datasets. Then the isolation forest algorithm is implemented for anomaly detection with well-tuned parameters of the number of decision trees and the number of samples in each decision tree. Structural health monitoring data of a suspension bridge are collected to verify the proposed approach, and the detection targets are specified as viscous damper malfunction and a specific holiday period. The proposed approach demonstrates its ability to detect both events successfully, which can shed light on the predictive and preventive maintenance of the bridge.

Automated summary

Long-span cable-supported bridges are susceptible to significant deformations due to temperature, wind, and vehicle loads, which can result in malfunction or failure of important components. This study proposes a condition assessment approach using girder end displacement measurements, incorporating data preprocessing, feature characterization, datasets preparation and splitting, and anomaly detection. The approach employs a physics-based correlation between temperature and displacement for noise detection, calculates hourly cumulative displacement as the feature, and uses the isolation forest algorithm for anomaly detection. The proposed approach successfully detects viscous damper malfunction and a specific holiday period, demonstrating its potential for predictive and preventive maintenance of bridges.