Recently, a suit of data-driven localized damage detection techniques, which do not require a direct comparison with the previously obtained baseline data, has been developed specifically for field applications. We call them as reference-free techniques. The main advantage of the reference-free techniques is that they can provide robust diagnosis even when the system being monitored is exposed to ambient variations such as traffic and temperature variations. Since the reference-free techniques do not rely on comparison with previously obtained baseline data, they could be less sensitive to these undesirable changes. This study leverages a unique opportunity to conduct destructive testing on field bridges. Representative defects have been introduced to a decommissioned bridge, and the performance of the proposed techniques is examined by applying these techniques to the data obtained from the decommissioned bridge. To our best knowledge, this is one of the few studies where local online damage detection techniques are tested under field bridge structures.
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