Seismic Damage Identification of Composite Cable-Stayed Bridges Using Support Vector Machines and Wavelet Networks

A seismic damage identification method for composite cable-stayed bridges has been developed. The proposed method is based on a Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Wavelet Network (WN). A shaking table test of a composite cable-stayed bridge is employed to verify the identification accuracy of the WNSVM method; the test results show that the nonlinear Finite Element Model (FEM) can correctly simulate the single-tower cable-stayed bridge, and the learning samples of WNSVM can be produced based on the nonlinear FEM. The structural damage results identified by the WNSVM method are in good agreement with those obtained by the shaking table test, and the maximum error is less than 8%. Therefore, the WNSVM method can be used for the seismic damage identification of composite cable-stayed bridges.