Ambient and forced vibration tests of a box girder concrete bridge model

In this paper, ambient and forced vibration tests of a box girder laboratory con-crete bridge model are described to obtain experimental dynamic characteristics such as natural frequencies, mode shapes and damping ratios. The bridge deck consists of a main span of 3m and two side span of 1.5m each. The total bridge length is 6m and width of bridge is 0.60m. Heights of the bridge column and bridge deck are 0.80m and 0.30m, respectively. In the forced vibration tests, excitation of the bridge model is induced by an impact hammer. The ambient vibration tests are conducted under natural excitation such as wind and small impact effects. The Enhanced Frequency Domain Decomposition method in the frequency domain and the Sto-chastic Subspace Identification method in the time domain are used to extract the dynamic characteristics. At the end of the study, dynamic characteristics obtained from ambient and force vibration tests are compared with each other. It is seen that there is a good agreement be-tween both results and they are nearly closed to each other.