The civil engineering profession is continuously searching for reliable methods and tools to improve the quality and life span of large structures. It is well known that most studies in this field were based on static loading analyses. Nowadays, dynamic loads have been one particular concern within the civil engineering community and GPS can offer direct measures of dynamic displacements of suspension bridges induced by traffic, wind and earthquake forces. This paper presents the results of the GPS data processing using the Phase Residual Method (PRM), to monitor the dynamic behavior of the Pierre-Laporte Suspension Bridge in Quebec City, Canada. Three, 48-hour GPS sessions were conducted during the months of July and October 1996 and February 1997 by researchers from the Centre for Research in Geomatics at Universite Laval in Quebec City. The researchers from Universite Laval initially processed GPS data in 1997, using a modified algorithm for on-the-fly ambiguity resolution and processed again by us using PRM. The main objective of this research is to measure small dynamic displacements and their precision by single frequency receivers. In order to verify if GPS, analyzed under PRM, can be used as a trustable and friendly tool for characterizing the dynamic behavior of large structures, comparisons between processing results obtained using the Modified GPS-OTF Algorithm and PRM are presented in this paper.
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