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Structural damage on bridges presents a hazard to public safety and can lead to fatalities. This article contributes to the development of an alternative monitoring system for civil structures, based on passive measurements of seismic elastic waves. Cross-correlations of traffic noise recorded at geophone receiver pairs were found to be sufficiently stable for comparison and sensitive to velocity changes in the medium. As such velocity variations could be caused by damage, their detection would be valuable in structural health monitoring systems. A method, originally introduced for seismological applications and named Passive Image Interferometry, was used to quantify small velocity fluctuations in the medium and thereby observe structural changes. Evaluation of more than 2 months of continuous geophone recordings at a reinforced concrete bridge yielded velocity variations Δv/v in the range of -1.5% to +2.1%. The observed fluctuations correlate with associated temperature time series with a striking resemblance which is remarkable for two completely independent data sets. Using a linear regression approach, a relationship between temperature and velocity variations of on average 0.064% °C(-1) can be identified. This value corresponds well to other studies on concrete structures.

Coda wave interferometry is a recent analysis method now widely used in seismology. It uses the increased sensitivity of multiply scattered elastic waves with long travel-times for monitoring weak changes in a medium. While its application for structural monitoring has been shown to work under laboratory conditions, the usability on a real structure with known material changes had yet to be proven. This article presents experiments on a concrete bridge during construction. The results show that small velocity perturbations induced by a changing stress state in the structure can be determined even under adverse conditions. Theoretical estimations based on the stress calculations by the structural engineers are in good agreement with the measured velocity variations.