System identification of history Mexican masonry bridges

摘要

Mexico has an important number of cities recognized by the UNESCO as World Heritage. Many of them, identified since the colony times, are churches, colonial buildings and highway and railway bridges. In several areas of the country there are highway and railway bridges with an important historical value due to the construction techniques and materials implemented in those days. In spite of their importance, very few efforts have been led to study the masonry historic bridges' origin and pathologies that eventually would conduct to a failure condition. The main objectives of this work are to identify the dynamic properties of the masonry historic bridges, to characterize, in a second stage, bridges pathologies, and to develop numerical models that allow the correct identification of the structural components of the bridges and subsequently to identify the damage mechanisms of this type of structures. Based on the information obtained from a survey, an ambient vibration campaign tests was conducted, and the signals measured were processed using the ARTEMIS software to identify the dynamic properties for three bridges.