Experimental Testing of Controllable Damping Devices toward Extending the Lifespan of Existing Highway Bridges: Fid-Bau Portal

Experimental Testing of Controllable Damping Devices toward Extending the Lifespan of Existing Highway Bridges

R. E. Christenson / Z. Jiang / S. J. Kim / S. Plude

The objectives of this project were to advance the state-of-the-art in highway bridge control and monitoring by: (1) experimentally verify the application of controllable Magneto-Rheological (MR) fluid dampers to reduce the maximum stresses in a highway bridges due to heavy truck traffic; and (2) demonstrate experimentally methodologies to utilize the controllable damping devices for enhanced bridge monitoring. Magneto-Rheological (MR) fluid dampers can be used to reduce the traffic induced vibration in highway bridges and protect critical structural components from fatigue. Experimental verification is needed to verify the applicability of the MR dampers for this purpose. Real-Time Hybrid Simulation (RTHS), where the MR dampers are physically tested and dynamically linked to a numerical model of the highway bridge and truck traffic, provides an efficient and effective means to experimentally examine the efficacy of MR dampers for fatigue protection of highway bridges. This project starts with an initial numerical analysis of a simplified bridge model controlled with multiple MR dampers to better understand the control expectations of the MR dampers for traffic induced vibration control. This project then continues to experimentally examine a complex highway bridge model with 263,178 degrees-of-freedom under truck loading using the proposed convolution integral (CI) method of RTHS for a semiactive structural control strategy employing two large-scale 200 kN MR dampers. This final report documents these efforts