Detection of Structural Vibration with High-Rate Precise Point Positioning: Case Study Results Based on 100 Hz Multi-GNSS Observables and Shake-Table Simulation

Abstract

This contribution presents and assesses the methodology aiming at the characterization of the structural vibrations with high-rate GNSS measurements. As commonly employed precise point positioning (PPP) based on ionosphere-free linear combination of undifferenced signals may not meet the high requirements in terms of displacement precision, a modified processing strategy has been proposed. The algorithms were implemented in the own-developed GNSS processing software and validated using the designed experiment. For this purpose, we have set up a field experiment taking advantage of the prototype shake-table, which simulated the dynamic horizontal displacements of the GNSS antenna. The device ensured a periodic motion of the antenna with modifiable characteristics, namely amplitude and frequency. In this experiment, we have set the amplitudes from 1.5 to 9 mm and the frequency to 3.80 Hz. As a dataset, we have used 100 Hz GPS, Galileo, and BDS measurements. The results confirmed a high applicability of the enhanced PPP processing strategy for precise displacement detection. Specifically, it was feasible to obtain the dynamic displacements with precision at the level of millimeters. The differences between the PPP-derived amplitude and the true amplitude of the simulated displacements were in the range of 0.5–1.3 mm, whereas the difference between the detected and benchmark frequency did not exceed 0.026 Hz. Hence, the proposed methodology allows meeting the specific demands of structural displacement monitoring.