Damage Assessment of Steel Box-girder Bridge using Neural Networks

Damages of a steel box girder bridge are detected using neural networks. Damage detection using neural networks has increasing momentum in structural engineering. It is a new effort to overcome the limitations of the conventional analytical approaches and applied to the damage detection of a steel box-girder bridge. Data sets for training neural networks are obtained from the acceleration response of the bridge under moving load. Finite element model is first defined and damages of 5, 10, 15 and 20% are assumed in the model. Not only the trained damages but untrained damages are detected in the assessment stage. The untrained damages can be detected with acceptable errors. Because the number of damaged locations are limited to a few parts, more researches are needed to put this technique into practice.