A new damage indicator based on homogeneity and wireless accelerometers for evaluating the structural condition of a cable-stayed bridge

Structural health monitoring is crucial to avoid devastating human and economic losses, mainly for large and high-demanding structures as the case of vehicular bridges. In this regard, a methodology to identify a cable loss in a cable-stayed bridge from the analysis of vibration signals, which are provided by a set of wireless accel-erometers installed on the bridge, is here presented. Regarding the method, the damage detection is carried out by a new proposed damage indicator, which is calculated from the homogeneity values of the vibration signals. The homogeneity values are also employed as inputs in a multilayer perceptron neural network to determine the damage location when a damage condition is identified. The usefulness of the proposal is tested on the vibra-tional responses obtained in experimental manner from the Rio Papaloapan Bridge located in Veracruz, Mexico, resulting in 93.33% of effectiveness to detect and locate the cable loss.