Experimental Vibration Analysis of Civil Engineering Structures

19-21 October 2015, Dübendorf, Switzerland

Preface

The steady impressive progress of sensing and computer technology has dramatically changed our ability to ac-quire data about the vibration performance of civil structures. What decades ago was a complex activity provided by institutions that were big enough to afford an expensive instrumentation and a group of highly skilled experts is today the daily business of specialized small private companies. This extension of our capabilities to perform measurements on civil structures has provided deepened and enriched our knowledge about the performance of these structures under operational conditions. Many unexpected results have also sharpened our consciousness about the limitations of our standard analysis and design models. In the future information society data are ex-pected to be one of the most important resources. The ability of collecting data about the performance of civil structures will there-fore further increase and probably involve more and more players without specialized skills. Data, however, are only in the minority of cases equivalent to information but the raw material from which infor-mation is extracted by a usually non-trivial analysis and interpretation process. While today analysis and interpre-tation is the realm of engineers in the future it’s very likely that computer systems using artificial intelligence will increasingly perform fully automated data analysis and interpretation. Since civil structures are usually complex and unique and therefore less predictable than many other modern industrial products plenty of research will be needed to develop novel reliable measurement, data analysis and interpretation methods and tools which comply with the requirement of such fully automated systems.

EVACES, the International Conference on Experimental Vibration Analysis of Civil Engineering Structures, is the Fo-rum where experts from all over the world have the opportunity to exchange their knowledge and experience about data acquisition, analysis and interpretation in the field of vibration of civil structures with the goal to con-tribute to the progress of science and technology. After the first edition in 2005 in Bordeaux (France), which was organized by the founder of EVACES Christian Cremona, four additional editions were held in a two years cycle in Porto (Portugal), Wroclaw (Poland), Varenna (Italy) and Ouro Preto (Brazil). Ten years after the first edition EVACES was held in Dübendorf, Switzerland, from October 19-21 and was organized by Empa, Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology. For the first time the EVACES proceedings are published exclusively on an open access web platform with the scope to promote the dissemination and valorisation of the papers. We express our sincere thanks to the members of the Organizing Committee, the members of the Scientific Committee and in particular to all authors and participants for their valuable contributions.

Paris and Dübendorf, September 2015
Christian Cremona and Glauco Feltrin

International Scientific Committee

A.E. Aktan, University of Cincinnati, USA
F. Barbosa, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil
F. Benedettini, Università degli Studi dell'Aquila, Italy
J. Bien, Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland
F. Branco, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal
R. Brincker, Aarhus University, Denmark
J. Brownjohn, University of Exeter, UK
E. Caetano, Universidade do Porto, Portugal
R. Cantieni, rci dynamics, Switzerland
J. Conte, University of California, San Diego, USA
C. Cremona, Sétra, France (Chairman)
A. Cunha, Universidade do Porto, Portugal
A. Cury, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Brazil
G. Feltrin, Empa, Switzerland
A. Fournol, AVLS, France
C. Gentile, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
R. Karoumi, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
A. Morassi, Università degli Studi di Udine, Italy
A. Pavic, University of Exeter, UK
G. de Roeck, KU Leuven, Belgium
W. Rücker, BAM, Germany
M. Talbot, Canada
R. Testa, Columbia University, USA

Organizing Committee

Glauco Feltrin, Empa, Switzerland
Veronika Huber, Empa, Switzerland
Michèle Köhli, Empa, Switzerland
Nadine Rieder, Empa, Switzerland

Keynote lectures

Dynamics of railway bridges: analysis and verification by field tests

Dr. Andreas Andersson

KTH - Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Dynamic testing of cable structures

Prof. Elsa Caetano

University of Porto, Portugal

Structural identification and monitoring based on uncertain/limited information

Prof. Eleni N. Chatzi

ETH Zürich, Switzerland

Dynamic properties of footbridges: influence of asphalt pavement and support conditions

Dr. Benedikt Weber

Empa - Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, Switzerland

Modelling human actions on lightweight structures: experimental and numerical developments

Prof. Stana Živanović

University of Warwick, United Kingdom