PSI - Issue 78

Arash Rahimi et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 78 (2026) 1767–1774

1768

Introduction The demand for structural health monitoring of structures specially railway bridges in parallel with the increase in traffic loading and speed of the trains, has been growing in the last recent decades. The use of vibration responses of laboratory scaled models for condition assessment of structures under different loading of both undamaged and damage conditions has become more popular. In this case developing the dataset for condition assessment is being so important as the one span and three spans simply supported scaled experiment bridge proposed by Corbally and Woo Kim. Virtual laboratory model using Low-Cost Efficient sensors is also one of the other important parameters in modal measurements [Shokrollahi]. In this study, a lab-scale three-span bridge model was instrumented and tested under controlled conditions to investigate the structural response and potential damage scenarios using an integrated sensor network. The main goal is to assess the bridge's dynamic behaviour under moving vehicle loads, enabling damage detection through signal processing and data analysis. The bridge model consists of three spans with simply supported boundary conditions and the total length of 2 meters divided into lengths of 65, 70 and 65 centimeters. Each support was implemented using low-friction cylindrical rollers, allowing free rotation and horizontal displacement at one end, and restricted movement at the other, simulating realistic pinned-roller boundary conditions. This setup enables clear modal behavior and dynamic conditions of the bridge. The bridge was constructed using steel plates for the beams, supports and the deck with the nominal section properties in table 1. 1. These configurations were chosen to balance stiffness and flexibility, allowing detectable dynamic responses under moving loads.

Fig. 1. (a) Overview of the bridge

Fig. 2. (a) Pinned Support; (b) Roller Support