For cable bridges, the cable tension force plays a crucial role in their construction, assessment and long-term structural health monitoring. Cable tension forces vary in real time with the change of the moving vehicle loads and environmental effects, and this continual variation in tension force may cause fatigue damage of a cable. Traditional vibration-based cable tension force estimation methods can only obtain the time-averaged cable tension force and not the instantaneous force. This paper proposes a new approach to identify the time-varying cable tension forces of bridges based on an adaptive sparse time-frequency analysis method. This is a recently developed method to estimate the instantaneous frequency by looking for the sparsest time-frequency representation of the signal within the largest possible time-frequency dictionary (i.e. set of expansion functions). In the proposed approach, first, the time-varying modal frequencies are identified from acceleration measurements on the cable, then, the time-varying cable tension is obtained from the relation between this force and the identified frequencies. By considering the integer ratios of the different modal frequencies to the fundamental frequency of the cable, the proposed algorithm is further improved to increase its robustness to measurement noise. A cable experiment is implemented to illustrate the validity of the proposed method. For comparison, the Hilbert–Huang transform is also employed to identify the time-varying frequencies, which are then used to calculate the time-varying cable-tension force. The results show that the adaptive sparse time-frequency analysis method produces more accurate estimates of the time-varying cable tension forces than the Hilbert–Huang transform method.

METHODS AND APPLICATIONS OF ANALYSIS. 2000 International Press Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 591-604, September 2000 012

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In this paper, we adapt a simple weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) limiter, originally designed for discontinuous Galerkin (DG) schemes on two-dimensional unstructured triangular meshes, to the correction procedure via reconstruction (CPR) framework for solving nonlinear hyperbolic conservation laws on two-dimensional unstructured triangular meshes with straight or curved edges. This is an extension of our earlier work in which the WENO limiter was designed for the CPR framework on regular meshes. The objective of this simple WENO limiter is to simultaneously maintain uniform high order accuracy of the CPR framework in smooth regions and control spurious numerical oscillations near discontinuities. The WENO limiter we adopt in this paper uses information only from the target cell and its immediate neighbors. Hence, it is particularly simple to implement and will not harm the conservativeness and compactness of the CPR framework. Since the CPR framework with this WENO limiter does not in general satisfy the positivity preserving property, we also extend the positivity-preserving limiters to the CPR framework. Numerical results for both scalar equations and Euler systems of compressible gas dynamics are provided to illustrate the good behavior of this procedure.