Determining and Investigating the Variability of Bridges’ Natural Frequencies with Ground-Based Radar

Assessing the condition of bridge infrastructure requires estimating damage-sensitive features from reliable sensor data. This study proposes to estimate natural frequencies from displacement measurements of a ground-based interferometric radar (GBR). These frequencies are determined from the damped vibration after each vehicle crossing with least squares and compared to a Frequency Domain Decomposition result. We successfully applied the approach in an exemplary measurement campaign at a bridge near Coburg (Germany) with an additional comparison to commonly used strain sensors. Since temperature greatly influences natural frequencies, linear regression is used to correct this influence. A simulation shows that GBR, combined with the least squares approach, achieves the lowest uncertainty and variation in the linear regression, indicating better damage detection results. However, the success of the damage detection highly depends on correctly determining the temperature influence, which might vary throughout the structure. Future work should further investigate the biases and variability of this influence.