Research on Moving Force Estimation of the Bridge Structure using the Adaptive Input Estimation Method

The vehicle/bridge interaction moving forces are important for the bridge structure design and the reliability evaluation. Therefore, the dynamic moving forces produced by the vehicles on the bridge structure must be determined by adopting the estimation method or measurement techniques. Direct measurement of the vehicle moving forces using sensors with higher precision is expensive and is subject to bias, while results from the modeling errors [1~4] produced during the computation. The Weight-in-Motion (WIM) systems have been developed to solve above problems by Davis et al [5~7], but these techniques can only measure the static vehicle axle loads. However, the vehicle dynamic moving forces usually cause the damage of the road surfaces more easily than the static loads [8] do. Therefore, it is important to obtain the histories of the vehicle/bridge interaction dynamic moving forces.