Resumen
A large infrastructure system of bridges is essential to economical development of a country. Given such importance, a detailed structural inspection and evaluation is required in order to decide whether the bridges may be reinforced or retrofitted to extend their service life or whether they should be replaced by new structures. The structural engineer in charge of such decisions must face the limited amount of information of old structures which leads to implementation of time-expensive destructive methods in order to obtain basic information about the structure. A dynamic monitoring combined with a non-linear modeling is proposed to enable structural identification and damage detection, beyond the scope of traditional linear-model methods commonly used and available in the literature. This work presents several case studies on vibration records used in bridges and also specific topics that the structural engineer need to know for a good interpretation of results.