• Computational Structural Engineering : An International Journal
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.11-17
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• 2002

Cost-effectiveness in design is considered for determining the target reliability of concrete bridges under seismic actions. This objective can be achieved based on the economic optimization of the expected life-cycle cost of a bridge, which includes initial cost, direct losses, and indirect losses of a bridge due to strong earthquakes over its lifetime. A separating factor is defined to consider the redundancy of a transportation network. The Park-Ang damage model is employed to define the damage of a bridge under seismic action, and a Monte Carlo method based on the DRAIN-2DX program is developed to assess the failure probability of a bridge. The results for an example bridge analyzed in this paper show that the optimal target failure probability depends on the traffic volume carried by the bridge and is between 1.0×10/sup -3/ to 3.0×10/sup -3/ over a life of 50 years.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.521-527
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• 2017

This paper proposes using the multi-type sensor vibration measurements, such as from a relative displacement sensors and a traditional accelerometer for the damage detection of shear connectors in composite bridge under moving loads. Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT) spectra of these responses will be fused with a data fusion approach i.e., Dempster-Shafer method, to detect the damage of shear connectors. Experimental studies on a composite bridge model in the laboratory are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and performance of using the proposed approach in detecting the damage of shear connectors in composite bridges. Both undamaged and damaged scenarios are considered. The detection results with the data fusion of multi-type sensor measurements show a more reliable and robust performance and accuracy, avoiding the false identifications.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.223-237
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• 2009

The present research aims to develop a methodology to rapidly assess bridges with damage to the superstructure, caused by overheight trucks or lower-than-average overhead clearance. Terrestrial laser scanning and image processing techniques are combined with the finite element method to arrive at an analytical model which is more accurate, with respect to the complex geometrical aspects of the bridge in its damaged configuration. ""Virtual load testing"" may subsequently be carried out on this analytical model to determine the reserve capacity of the structure in an objective manner.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.171-188
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• 2019

This study proposed a new and efficient 2D damage-plasticity model within the framework of Isogeometric analysis (IGA) for the geometrically nonlinear damage analysis of concrete. Since concrete exhibits complicated material properties, two internal variables are introduced to measure the hardening/softening behavior of concrete in tension and compression, and an implicit gradient-enhanced formulation is adopted to restore the well-posedness of the boundary value problem. The numerical results calculated by the model is compared with the experimental data of three benchmark problems of plain concrete (three-point and four-point bending single-notched beams and four-point bending double-notched beam) to illustrate the geometrical flexibility, accuracy, and robustness of the proposed approach. In addition, the influence of the characteristic length on the numerical results of each problem is investigated.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.70 no.3
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• pp.311-324
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• 2019

Long-span steel suspension bridges develop significant vibrations under the effect of external time-variable loadings because their slenderness. This causes significant stresses variations that could induce fatigue problems in critical components of the bridge. The research outcome presented in this paper includes a fatigue analysis of a long suspension bridge with 3300 meters central suspended span under wind action and train transit. Special focus is made on the counterintuitive interaction effects between train and wind loads in terms of fatigue damage accumulation in the hanger ropes. In fact the coupling of the two actions is shown to have positive effects for some hangers in terms of damage accumulation. Fatigue damage is evaluated using a linear accumulation model (Palmgren-Miner rule), analyses are carried out in time domain by a three-dimensional non-linear finite element model of the bridge. Rational explanation regarding the above-mentioned counterintuitive behavior is given on the basis of the stress time histories obtained for pertinent hangers under the effects of wind and train as acting separately or simultaneously. The interaction between wind and train traffic loads can be critical for a some hanger ropes therefore interaction phenomena within loads should be considered in the design.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.44 no.1
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• pp.19-32
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• 2024

An investigation into the detailed safety diagnosis report indicates that domestic highway bridges mainly suffer from defects, deterioration, and damage due to physical forces. In particular, deterioration is an inevitable damage that occurs due to various environmental and external factors over time. In particular, bridge deck is very vulnerable to cracks, which occur along with various types of damages such as rebar corrosion and surface delamination. Thus, this study evaluates a correlation between heterogeneous damage and deterioration environment and then identifies the main causes of such heterogeneous damage. After all, a bridge heterogeneous damage prediction model was developed using random forests to determine the top five factors contributing to the occurrence of the heterogeneous damage. The results of the study would serve as a basic data for estimating bridge maintenance and budget.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.60-71
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• 2014

Cable-stayed bridge, which is one of the representative long-spanned bridge, needs prompt maintenances when a stay cable is damaged because it may cause structural failure of the entire bridge. Many researches are being conducted to develop abnormal behavior detection algorithms for the purpose of shortening the reaction time after the occurrence of structural damage. To improve the accuracy of the damage detection algorithm, ample observation data from various kinds of damage responses is needed. However, it is difficult to measure an abnormal response by damaging an existing bridge, numerical simulation can be an effective alternative. In most previous studies, which simulate the damage responses of a cable-stayed bridge, the damages has been considered as a load variation without regard to its stiffness variation. The analyses of using these simplification could not calculate exact responses of damaged structure, though it may reserve a sufficient accuracy for the purpose of bridge design. This study suggests Gradual Bilinear Method (GBM) which simulate the damage responses of cable-stayed bridge considering the stiffness and mass variation, and develops an analysis program. The developed program is verified from the responses of a simple model. The responses of a existing cable-stayed bridge model are analyzed with respect to the fracture delay time and damage ratio. The results of this study can be used to develop and verify the highly accurate abnormal behavior detection algorithm for safety management of architecture/large structures.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.325-334
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• 2023

Computer vision-based damage detection enables non-contact, efficient and low-cost bridge health monitoring, which reduces the need for labor-intensive manual inspection or that for a large number of on-site sensing instruments. By leveraging recent semantic segmentation approaches, we can detect regions of critical structural components and identify damages at pixel level on images. However, existing methods perform poorly when detecting small and thin damages (e.g., cracks); the problem is exacerbated by imbalanced samples. To this end, we incorporate domain knowledge to introduce a hierarchical semantic segmentation framework that imposes a hierarchical semantic relationship between component categories and damage types. For instance, certain types of concrete cracks are only present on bridge columns, and therefore the noncolumn region may be masked out when detecting such damages. In this way, the damage detection model focuses on extracting features from relevant structural components and avoid those from irrelevant regions. We also utilize multi-scale augmentation to preserve contextual information of each image, without losing the ability to handle small and/or thin damages. In addition, our framework employs an importance sampling, where images with rare components are sampled more often, to address sample imbalance. We evaluated our framework on a public synthetic dataset that consists of 2,000 railway bridges. Our framework achieves a 0.836 mean intersection over union (IoU) for structural component segmentation and a 0.483 mean IoU for damage segmentation. Our results have in total 5% and 18% improvements for the structural component segmentation and damage segmentation tasks, respectively, compared to the best-performing baseline model.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.165-174
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• 2010

In this paper, a two-phase structural health monitoring system using acceleration response signatures are presented to firstly alarm the change in structural condition and to secondly detect the changed location for full-scale concrete girder bridges. Firstly, Mihocheon Bridge which is a two-span continuous concrete girder bridge is selected as the target structure. The dynamic response features of Mihocheon Bridge are extracted by forced vibration test using bowling ball. Secondly, the damage alarming occurrence and the damage localization techniques are selected to design two-phase structural health monitoring system for Mihocheon Bridge. As the damage alarming techniques, auto-regressive model using time-domain signatures, correlation coefficient of frequency response function and frequency response ratio assurance criterion are selected. As the damage localization technique, modal strain energy-based damage index method is selected. Finally, the feasibility of two-phase structural health monitoring systems is evaluated from static loading tests using a dump truck.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.71 no.1
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• pp.57-63
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• 2019

During the last two decades, much joint research regarding vibration based methods has been done, leading to developing various algorithms and techniques. These algorithms and techniques can be divided into modal methods and signal methods. Although modal methods have been widely used for health monitoring and damage detection, signal methods due to higher efficiency have received considerable attention in various fields, including aerospace, mechanical and civil engineering. Signal-based methods are derived directly from the recorded responses through signal processing algorithms to detect damage. According to different signal processing techniques, signal-based methods can be divided into three categories including time domain methods, frequency domain methods, and time-frequency domain methods. The frequency domain methods are well-known and interest in using them has increased in recent years. To determine dynamic behaviours, to identify systems and to detect damages of bridges, different methods and algorithms have been proposed by researchers. In this study, a new algorithm to detect seismic damage in the bridge's piers is suggested. To evaluate the algorithm, an analytical model of a bridge with simple spans is used. Based on the algorithm, before and after damage, the bridge is excited by a sine force, and the piers' responses are measured. The dynamic specifications of the bridge are extracted by Power Spectral Density function. In addition, the Least Square Method is used to detect damage in the bridge's piers. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm can identify the seismic damage effectively. The algorithm is output-only method and measuring the excitation force is not needed. Moreover, the proposed approach does not need numerical models.