The objective of this work was to develop a methodology for geodetic monitoring on onshore wind towers, to ascertain the existence of displacements from object points located in the tower and at the foundation's base. The geodesic auscultation was carried out in the Gravatá 01 and 02 wind towers of the Eólica Gravatá wind farm, located in the Brazilian municipality of Gravatá-PE, using a stable Measurement Reference System. To verify the existence of displacements, pins were implanted, with semi-spherical surfaces, at the bases of the towers being monitored, measured by means of high-precision geometric leveling and around the Gravatá 02 tower, concrete landmarks, iron rods and reflective sheets were implanted, observed using geodetic/topographic methods: GNSS survey, transverse with forced centering, three-dimensional irradiation, edge measurement method and trigonometric leveling of unilateral views. It was found that in the Gravatá 02 tower the average rays of the circular sections of the transverse welds (ST) were 1.8431 m ± 0.0005 m (ST01) and 1.6994 m ± 0.0268 m of ST22, where, 01 and 22 represent the serial number of the transverse welds along the tower. The average calculation of the deflection between the coordinates of the center of the circular section of the ST22 and the vertical reference alignment of the ST1 was 0°2'39.22" ± 2.83" in the Northwest direction and an average linear difference of 0.0878 m ± 0.0078 m. The top deflection angle was 0°8'44.88" and a linear difference of ± 0.2590 m, defined from a non-linear function adjusted by Least Squares Method (LSM).

The use of structural control devices to minimize structural response to seismic/dynamic excitations has attracted increased attention in recent years. The use of magnetorheological (MR) dampers as a control device have captured the attention of researchers in this field due to its flexibility, adaptability, easy control, and low power requirement compared to other control devices. However, little attention has been paid to the effect of configuration and number of dampers installed in a structure on responses reduction. This study assesses the control of a five-story structure using one and two MR dampers at different stories to determine the optimal damper positions and configurations based on performance indices. This paper also addresses the fail-safe current value to be applied to the MR damper at each floor in the event of feedback or control failure. The model is mathematically simulated in SIMULINK/MATLAB environment. Linear control strategies for current at 0 A, 0.5 A, 1 A, 1.5 A, 2 A, and 2.5 A are implemented for MR dampers, and the response of the structure to these control strategies for different configurations of dampers is compared with the uncontrolled structure. Based on the performance indices, it was concluded that the dampers should be positioned starting from the ground floor, then the 2^nd floor followed by 1^st and rest of the floors sequentially. The failsafe value of current for MR dampers located in lower floors (G+1) should be kept at a higher value compared to dampers at top floors for effective passive control of multi-story structures.

This paper presents an analytical approach to calculate the buckling load of the cylindrical ring structures subjected to both hydrostatic and hydrodynamic pressures. Based on the conservative law of energy and Timoshenko beam theory, a theoretical formula, which can be used to evaluate the critical pressure of buckling, is first derived for the simplified cylindrical ring structures. It is assumed that the hydrodynamic pressure can be treated as an equivalent hydrostatic pressure as a cosine function along the perimeter while the thickness ratio is limited to 0.2. Note that this paper limits the deformed shape of the cylindrical ring structures to an elliptical shape. The proposed analytical solutions are then compared with the numerical simulations. The critical pressure is evaluated in this study considering two possible failure modes: ultimate failure and buckling failure. The results show that the proposed analytical solutions can correctly predict the critical pressure for both failure modes. However, it is not recommended to be used when the hydrostatic pressure is low or medium (less than 80% of the critical pressure) as the analytical solutions underestimate the critical pressure especially when the ultimate failure mode occurs. This implies that the proposed solutions can still be used properly when the subsea vehicles are located in the deep parts of the ocean where the hydrostatic pressure is high. The finding will further help improve the geometric design of subsea vehicles against both hydrostatic and hydrodynamic pressures to enhance its strength and stability when it moves underwater. It will also help to control the speed of the subsea vehicles especially they move close to the sea bottom to prevent a catastrophic failure.

While the pavement rating system is being utilized for periodic road condition assessment in the Eastern Region municipality of Saudi Arabia, the condition assessment is costly, time-consuming, and not comprehensive as only few parts of the road are randomly selected for the assessment. Thus, this study is aimed at developing a condition assessment model for a specific sample of a residential road network in Dammam City based on an individual road and a road network. The model was developed using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) according to the defect types and their levels of severity. The defects were arranged according to four categories: structure, construction, environmental, and miscellaneous, which was adopted from sewer condition coding systems. The developed model was validated by municipality experts and was adjudged to be acceptable and more economical compared to results from the Eastern region municipality (Saudi Arabia) model. The outcome of this paper can assist with the allocation of the government's budget for maintenance and capital programs across all Saudi municipalities through maintaining road infrastructure assets at the required level of services.

Traditional approaches for structural health monitoring (SHM) seldom take ambient uncertainty (temperature, humidity, ambient vibration) into consideration, while their impacts on structural responses are substantial, leading to a possibility of raising false alarms. A few predictors model-based approaches deal with these uncertainties through complex numerical models running online, rendering the SHM approach to be compute-intensive, slow, and sometimes not practical. Also, with model-based approaches, the imperative need for a precise understanding of the structure often poses a problem for not so well understood complex systems. The present study employs a data-based approach coupled with Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) to correlate recorded response time histories under varying temperature conditions to corresponding damage scenarios. EMD decomposes the response signal into a finite set of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). A two-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (2DCNN) is further trained to associate these IMFs to the respective damage cases. The use of IMFs in place of raw signals helps to reduce the impact of sensor noise while preserving the essential spatio-temporal information less-sensitive to thermal effects and thereby stands as a better damage-sensitive feature than the raw signal itself. The proposed algorithm is numerically tested on a single span bridge under varying temperature conditions for different damage severities. The dynamic strain is recorded as the response since they are frame-invariant and cheaper to install. The proposed algorithm has been observed to be damage sensitive as well as sufficiently robust against measurement noise.