Sensors, Vol. 20, Pages 1109: Bridge Displacement Estimation Using a Co-Located Acceleration and Strain (Sensors)

Structural displacement is an important metric for assessing structural conditions because it has a direct relationship with the structural stiffness. Many bridge displacement measurement techniques have been developed, but most methods require fixed reference points in the vicinity of the target structure that limits the field implementations. A promising alternative is to use reference-free measurement techniques that indirectly estimate the displacement by using measurements such as acceleration and strain. This paper proposes novel reference-free bridge displacement estimation by the fusion of single acceleration with pseudo-static displacement derived from co-located strain measurements. First, we propose a conversion of the strain at the center of a beam into displacement based on the geometric relationship between strain and deflection curves with reference-free calibration. Second, an adaptive Kalman filter is proposed to fuse the displacement generated by strain with acceleration by recursively estimating the noise covariance of displacement from strain measurements which is vulnerable to measurement condition. Both numerical and experimental validations are presented to demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed approach.