• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.131-157
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• 2014

Special track systems used to divert a train to other directions or other tracks are generally called 'railway turnout'. A traditional turnout system consists of steel rails, switches, crossings, steel plates, fasteners, screw spikes, timber bearers, ballast and formation. The wheel rail contact over the crossing transfer zone has a dip-like shape and can often cause detrimental impact loads on the railway track and its components. The large impact also emits disturbing noises (either impact or ground-borne noise) to railway neighbors. In a brown-field railway track where an existing aged infrastructure requires renewal or maintenance, some physical constraints and construction complexities may dominate the choice of track forms or certain components. With the difficulty to seek for high-quality timbers with dimensional stability, a methodology to replace aged timber bearers in harsh dynamic environments is to adopt an alternative material that could mimic responses and characteristics of timber in both static and dynamic loading conditions. A critical review has suggested an application of an alternative material called fibre-reinforced foamed urethane (FFU). The full-scale capacity design makes use of its comparable engineering characteristics to timber, high-impact attenuation, high damping property, and a longer service life. A field trial to investigate in-situ behaviours of a turnout grillage system using an alternative material, 'fibre-reinforced foamed urethane (FFU)' bearers, has been carried out at a complex turnout junction under heavy mixed traffics at Hornsby, New South Wales, Australia. The turnout junction was renewed using the FFU bearers altogether with new special track components. Influences of the FFU bearers on track geometry (recorded by track inspection vehicle 'AK Car'), track settlement (based on survey data), track dynamics, and acoustic characteristics have been measured. Operational train pass-by measurements have been analysed to evaluate the effectiveness of the replacement methodology. Comparative studies show that the use of FFU bearers generates higher rail and sleeper accelerations but the damping capacity of the FFU help suppress vibration transferring onto other track components. The survey data analysis suggests a small vertical settlement and negligible lateral movement of the turnout system. The static and dynamic behaviours of FFU bearers appear to equate that of natural timber but its service life is superior.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.10-21
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• 2015

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is a technique to diagnose an accurate and reliable condition of civil infrastructure by collecting and analyzing responses from distributed sensors. In recent years, aging civil structures have been increasing and they require further developed SHM technology for development of sustainable society. Wireless smart sensor and network technology, which is one of the recently emerging SHM techniques, enables more effective and economic SHM system in comparison to the existing wired systems. Researchers continue on development of the capability and extension of wireless smart sensors, and implement performance validation in various in-laboratory and outdoor full-scale experiments. This paper presents a summary of recent (mostly after 2010) researches on smart sensors, focused on the newly developed hardware, software, and validation examples of the developed smart sensors.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.111-122
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• 2020

Researchers up to date have introduced several Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) techniques with varying advantages and drawbacks for each. Satellite positioning systems (GPS, GLONASS and GALILEO) based techniques proved to be promising, especially for high natural period structures. Particularly, the GPS has proved sufficient performance and reasonable accuracy in tracking real time dynamic displacements of flexible structures independent of atmospheric conditions, temperature variations and visibility of the monitored object. Tall structures are particularly sensitive to oscillations produced by different sources of dynamic actions; such as typhoons. Wind forces induce in the structure both longitudinal and perpendicular displacements with respect to the wind direction, resulting in torsional effects, which are usually more complex to be detected. To efficiently track the horizontal rotations of the in-plane sections of such flexible structures, two main issues have to be considered: a suitable sensor topology (i.e., location, installation, and combination of sensors), and the methodology used to process the data recorded by sensors. This paper reports the contributions of the measurements recorded from dual frequency GPS receivers and uni-axial accelerometers in a full-scale experimental campaign. The Canton tower in Guangzhou-China is the case study of this research, which is instrumented with a long-term structural health monitoring system deploying both accelerometers and GPS receivers. The elaboration of combining the obtained rather long records provided by these two types of sensors in detecting the torsional behavior of the tower under ambient vibration condition and during strong wind events is discussed in this paper. Results confirmed the reliability of GPS receivers in obtaining the dynamic characteristics of the system, and its ability to capture the torsional response of the tower when used alone or when they are combined with accelerometers integrated data.

• Advances in concrete construction
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• v.10 no.6
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• pp.547-557
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• 2020

This paper presents one of the demonstration projects undertaken during the FP7 EU-funded Anagennisi project (Innovative reuse of all tyre components in concrete-2014-2017) on a full-scale (30 m×40 m, thickness: 0.2 m) Steel Fibre Reinforced Concrete (SFRC) slab-on-grade using a blend of manufactured steel fibres (MSF) and Recycled Tyre Steel Fibres (RTSF). The aim of the project was to assess the use of RTSF in everyday construction practice. The Anagennisi partners, Dulex Ltd in collaboration with Gradmont-Gradacac Ltd and University of Zagreb, designed, cast and monitored the long-term shrinkage deformations of the indoor slab-on-grade slab at Gradmont's precast concrete factory in Gradacac, Bosnia and Herzegovina. A hybrid RTSF mix (20 kg/㎥ of MSF+10 kg/㎥ of RTSF) was used to comply with the design criteria which included a maximum load capacity of 20 kN/㎡. The slab was monitored for one year using surveying equipment and visual inspection of cracks. During the monitoring period, the slab exhibited reasonable deformations (a maximum displacement of 3.3 mm for both, horizontal and vertical displacements) whilst after five years in use, the owners did not report any issues and were satisfied with the construction methodology and materials used. This work confirms that RSTF is a viable and sustainable solution for slab-on-grade applications.

• Economic and Environmental Geology
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.563-570
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• 2022

This study was objected to show the complexity of groundwater flow system in a site-scale area as a design parameter of the groundwater monitoring network for early detection of pollutant leakage from a potential source of groundwater contamination (e.g., storage tank). Around the tanks, three monitoring wells were installed at about 22~25 m deep and groundwater level and temperature had been monitored for 22 months by 2-minute interval, and then compared with precipitation and temperature data from nearby weather station. Annual variation of groundwater level and its response to precipitation event, variation of groundwater temperature and delayed response to that of atmospheric temperature indicate the complexity of groundwater flow and flow paths even in the relatively small area. Thus, groundwater monitoring network for early detection of contaminant leakage should be designed with full consideration of the complexity of groundwater flow system, identified from the detailed hydrogeological investigation of the site.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.33 no.6
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• pp.399-414
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• 2024

This study discusses the long-term deformation monitoring and shape sensing of bridge girder surfaces with an automated extraction scheme for point clouds in the Region Of Interest (ROI), invariant to the position of a Light Detection And Ranging system (LiDAR). Advanced smart construction necessitates continuous monitoring of the deformation and shape of bridge girders during the construction phase. An automated scheme is proposed for reconstructing geometric model of ROI in the presence of noisy non-stationary background. The proposed scheme involves (i) denoising irrelevant background point clouds using dimensions from the design model, (ii) extracting the outer boundaries of the bridge girder by transforming and processing the point cloud data in a two-dimensional image space, (iii) extracting topology of pre-defined targets using the modified Otsu method, (iv) registering the point clouds to a common reference frame or design coordinate using extracted predefined targets placed outside ROI, and (v) defining the bounding box in the point clouds using corresponding dimensional information of the bridge girder and abutments from the design model. The surface-fitted reconstructed geometric model in the ROI is superposed consistently over a long period to monitor bridge shape and derive deflection during the construction phase, which is highly correlated. The proposed scheme of combining 2D-3D with the design model overcomes the sensitivity of 3D point cloud registration to initial match, which often leads to a local extremum.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.40 no.1
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• pp.1-9
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• 2015

Compton cameras overcome several limitations of conventional mechanical collimation based gamma imaging devices, such as pin-hole imaging devices, due to its electronic collimation based on coincidence logic. Especially large-scale Compton camera has wide field of view and high imaging sensitivity. Those merits suggest that a large-scale Compton camera might be applicable to monitoring nuclear materials in large facilities without necessity of portability. To that end, our research group have made an effort to design a large-scale Compton camera for safeguard application. Energy resolution or position resolution of large-area detectors vary with configuration style of the detectors. Those performances directly affect the image quality of the large-scale Compton camera. In the present study, a series of Geant4 Monte Carlo simulations were performed in order to examine the effect of those detector parameters. Performance of the designed large-scale Compton camera was also estimated for various monitoring condition with realistic modeling. The conclusion of the present study indicates that the energy resolution of the component detector is the limiting factor of imaging resolution rather than the position resolution. Also, the designed large-scale Compton camera provides the 16.3 cm image resolution in full width at half maximum (angular resolution: $9.26^{\circ}$) for the depleted uranium source considered in this study located at the 1 m from the system when the component detectors have 10% energy resolution and 7 mm position resolution.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.6 no.5_6
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• pp.481-504
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• 2010

Wireless smart sensor networks (WSSNs) have been proposed by a number of researchers to evaluate the current condition of civil infrastructure, offering improved understanding of dynamic response through dense instrumentation. As focus moves from laboratory testing to full-scale implementation, the need for multi-hop communication to address issues associated with the large size of civil infrastructure and their limited radio power has become apparent. Multi-hop communication protocols allow sensors to cooperate to reliably deliver data between nodes outside of direct communication range. However, application specific requirements, such as high sampling rates, vast amounts of data to be collected, precise internodal synchronization, and reliable communication, are quite challenging to achieve with generic multi-hop communication protocols. This paper proposes two complementary reliable multi-hop communication solutions for monitoring of civil infrastructure. In the first approach, termed herein General Purpose Multi-hop (GPMH), the wide variety of communication patterns involved in structural health monitoring, particularly in decentralized implementations, are acknowledged to develop a flexible and adaptable any-to-any communication protocol. In the second approach, termed herein Single-Sink Multi-hop (SSMH), an efficient many-to-one protocol utilizing all available RF channels is designed to minimize the time required to collect the large amounts of data generated by dense arrays of sensor nodes. Both protocols adopt the Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol, which provides any-to-any routing and multi-cast capability, and supports a broad range of communication patterns. The proposed implementations refine the routing metric by considering the stability of links, exclude functionality unnecessary in mostly-static WSSNs, and integrate a reliable communication layer with the AODV protocol. These customizations have resulted in robust realizations of multi-hop reliable communication that meet the demands of structural health monitoring.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.207-230
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• 2012

Full-scale shake table seismic experiments and low-amplitude vibration tests on a masonry building are carried out to assess its seismic performance as well as study the effectiveness of a new multifunctional textile material for retrofitting masonry structures against earthquakes. The un-reinforced and the retrofitted with glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) strips masonry building was subjected to a series of earthquake excitations of increasing magnitude in order to progressively induce various small, moderate and severe levels of damage to the masonry walls. The performance of the original and retrofitted building states is evaluated. Changes in the dynamic characteristics (lowest four modal frequencies and damping ratios) of the building are used to assess and quantify the damage states of the masonry walls. For this, the dynamic modal characteristics of the structure states after each earthquake event were estimated by performing low-amplitude impulse hammer and sine-sweep forced vibration tests. Comparisons between the modal results calculated using traditional accelerometers and those using Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) sensors embedded in the reinforcing textile were carried on to investigate the reliability and accuracy of FBG sensors in tracking the dynamic behaviour of the building. The retrofitting actions restored the stiffness characteristics of the reinforced masonry structure to the levels of the original undamaged un-reinforced structure. The results show that despite a similar dynamic behavior identified, corresponding to reduction of the modal frequencies, the un-reinforced masonry building was severely damaged, while the reinforced masonry building was able to withstand, without visual damage, the induced strong seismic excitations. The applied GFRP reinforcement architecture for one storey buildings was experimentally proven reliable for the most severe earthquake accelerations. It was easily placed in a short time and it is a cost effective solution (covering only 20% of the external wall surfaces) when compared to the cost for full wall coverage by GFRPs.

• Journal of the Korean Statistical Society
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• v.36 no.2
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• pp.201-208
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• 2007

Evolutionary operation (EVOP) proposed by Box (1957) is a method for continuous monitoring and improvement of a full-scale manufacturing process with the objective of moving the operating conditions toward the better ones. EVOP consists of systematically making small changes in the levels of the two or three process variables under consideration. Data are collected on the response variable at each point of two level factorial design with the center point and a cycle is said to have been completed. The cycles are replicated sequentially until the decision is made on whether further cycle of experiments is needed to conclude the significance of any of main effects or interaction effects or the curvature. In this paper, an improved flow chart of EVOP is proposed and how to determine the number of cycles is studied based on the size of type II error. In order to reject the alternative hypothesis of interests with more confidence and conclude that we believe in the null hypothesis of no effects, we propose a counter measure $p^*-value$ corresponding to the p-value. The relationship of $p^*-value$ to the probability of type II error ${\beta}$ under the alternative hypothesis of interests is analogous to that of p-value to the probability of type I error ${\alpha}$. Also the implementation of EVOP with a mixture experiment is discussed.