• Wind and Structures
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.181-198
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• 2020

In the traditional buffeting response analysis method, the spanwise incomplete correlation of buffeting forces is always assumed to be same as that of the incident wind turbulence and the action of the signature turbulence is ignored. In this paper, three typical bridge decks usually adopted in the real bridge engineering, a single flat box deck, a central slotted box deck and a two-separated paralleled box deck, were employed as the investigated objects. The wind induced pressure on these bridge decks were measured via a series of wind tunnel pressure tests of the sectional models. The influences of the wind speed in the tests, the angle of attack, the turbulence intensity and the characteristic distance were taken into account and discussed. The spanwise root coherence of buffeting forces was also compared with that of the incidence turbulence. The signature turbulence effect on the spanwise root coherence function was decomposed and explained by a new empirical method with a double-variable model. Finally, the formula of a sum of rational fractions that accounted for the signature turbulence effect was proposed in order to fit the results of the spanwise root coherence function. The results show that, the spanwise root coherence of the drag force agrees with that of incidence turbulence in some range of the reduced frequency but disagree in the mostly reduced frequency. The spanwise root coherence of the lift force and the torsional moment is much larger than that of the incidence turbulence. The influences of the wind speed and the angle of attack are slight, and they can be ignored in the wind tunnel test. The spanwise coherence function often involves several narrow peaks due to the signature turbulence effect in the high reduced frequency zone. The spanwise coherence function is related to the spanwise separation distance and the spanwise integral length scales, and the signature turbulence effect is related to the deck-width-related reduced frequency.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.273-286
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• 2020

The pile group foundation is widely used for gravity pier of high-speed railway bridges in China. If a moderate or strong earthquake occurs, the pile-surrounding soil will exhibit obvious nonlinearity and significant pile group effect. In this study, an improved pushover analysis model for the pile group foundation with consideration of pile group effect is presented and validated by the quasi-static test. The improved model uses simplified springs to simulate the soil lateral resistance, side friction and tip resistance. PM (axial load-bending moment) plastic hinge model is introduced to simulate the impact of the axial force changing of pile group on their elastic-plastic characteristics. The pile group effect is considered in stress-stain relations of the lateral soil resistance with a reduction factor. The influence factors on nonlinear characteristics and plastic hinge distribution of the pile group foundation are discussed, including the pier height, longitudinal reinforcement ratio and stirrup ratio of the pile, and soil mechanical parameters. Furthermore, the displacement ductility factor, resistance increase factor and yielding stiffness ratio are provided to evaluate the seismic performance of soil-pile system. A case study for the pile group foundation of a railway simply supported beam bridge with a 32 m-span is conducted by numerical analysis. It is shown that the ultimate lateral force of pile group is not determined by the yielding force of the single one in these piles. Therefore, the pile group effect is essential for the seismic performance evaluation of the railway bridge with pile group foundation.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.209-230
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• 2016

The Canton Tower is a high-rise slender structure with a height of 610 m. A structural health monitoring system has been instrumented on the structure, by which data is continuously monitored. This paper presents an investigation on the identified modal properties of the Canton Tower using ambient vibration data collected during a whole day (24 hours). A recently developed Fast Bayesian FFT method is utilized for operational modal analysis on the basis of the measured acceleration data. The approach views modal identification as an inference problem where probability is used as a measure for the relative plausibility of outcomes given a model of the structure and measured data. Focusing on the first several modes, the modal properties of this supertall slender structure are identified on non-overlapping time windows during the whole day under normal wind speed. With the identified modal parameters and the associated posterior uncertainty, the distribution of the modal parameters in the future is predicted and assessed. By defining the modal root-mean-square value in terms of the power spectral density of modal force identified, the identified natural frequencies and damping ratios versus the vibration amplitude are investigated with the associated posterior uncertainty considered. Meanwhile, the correlations between modal parameters and temperature, modal parameters and wind speed are studied. For comparison purpose, the frequency domain decomposition (FDD) method is also utilized to identify the modal parameters. The identified results obtained by the Bayesian method, the FDD method and a finite element model are compared and discussed.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.43-68
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• 2013

The fluctuating wind induced vibration is one of the most important factors which has been taken into account in the design of long-span bridge due to the low stiffness and low natural frequency. Field measurement characteristics of sustained wind on structure site can provide accurate wind load parameters for wind field simulation and structural wind resistance design. As a suspension bridge with 1490 m main span, the Runyang Suspension Bridge (RSB) has high sensitivity to fluctuating wind. The simultaneous and continuously wind environment field measurement both in mid-span and on tower top is executed from 2005 up to now by the structural health monitoring system installed on this bridge. Based on the recorded data, the wind characteristic parameters, including mean wind speed, wind direction, the turbulence intensity, the gust factors, the turbulence integral length, power spectrum and spatial correlation, are analyzed in detail and the coherence functions of those parameters are evaluated using statistical method in this paper. The results indicate that, the turbulence component of sustain wind is larger than extremely strong winds although its mean wind speed is smaller; the correlation between turbulence parameters is obvious; the power spectrum is special and not accord with the Simiu spectrum and von Karman spectrum. Results obtained in this study can be used to evaluate the long term reliability of the Runyang Suspension Bridge and provide reference values for wind resistant design of other structures in this region.

• Ocean Systems Engineering
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.143-155
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• 2017

For complex flexible structures such as nets, the determination of drag forces and its deformation is a challenging task. The accurate prediction of loads on cages is one of the key steps in designing fish farm facilities. The basic physics with a simple cage, can be addressed by the use of experimental studies. However, to design more complex cage system for various environmental conditions, a reliable numerical simulation tool is essential. In this work, the current load on a cage is calculated using a Morison-force model applied at instantaneous positions of equivalent-net modeling. Variations of solidity ratio ($S_n$) of the net and current speed are considered. An equivalent array of cylinders is built to represent the physical netting. Based on the systematic comparisons between the published experimental data for Raschel nets and the current numerical simulations, carried out using the commercial software OrcaFlex, a new formulation for $C_d$ values, used in the equivalent-net model, is presented. The similar approach can also be applied to other netting materials following the same procedure. In case of high solidity ratio and current speed, the hybrid model defines $C_d$ as a function of Re (Reynolds number) and $S_n$ to better represent the corresponding weak diffraction effects. Otherwise, the conventional $C_d$ values depending only on Re can be used with including shielding effects for downstream elements. This new methodology significantly improves the agreement between numerical and experimental data.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.27 no.6
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• pp.399-416
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• 2018

In order to reveal the independent relationship between track irregularity and wind loads, the stochastic characteristics of train-bridge coupling systems subjected to wind loads were investigated by the multi-sample calculation. The vehicle was selected as 23 degrees of freedom dynamical model, and the bridge was described by three-dimensional finite element model. It was assumed that the wind loads were random processes with strong spatial correlation, while the track irregularities were stationary random ones. As a case study, a high-speed train running on a cable-stayed bridge subjected to wind loads was studied. The effect of rail irregularities was deemed to be independent of the effect of wind excitations on the coupling system in the same wind circumstance for the same project, leading to the conclusion that the effect of wind loads and moving vehicle could be calculated separately. The variance results of the stochastic responses of vehicle-bridge coupling system under the action of wind loads and rail irregularities together were equivalent to the sum of the variance of the responses induced by each excitation. Therefore, when one of the input excitations is different, only the effect of changed loads needs to be assessed. Moreover, the new calculated results were combined with the effect of unchanged loads to present the stochastic response of coupling system subjected to the different excitations, reducing the cost of computations. The stochastic characteristics, the CFD (cumulative distribution function) of the coupling system with different wind velocities, vehicle speed, and vehicle marshalling were studied likewise.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.84 no.4
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• pp.489-502
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• 2022

This paper is aimed at developing an optimization-based Finite Element model updating approach for structural damage identification and quantification. A modal flexibility-based error function is introduced, which uses modal assurance criterion to formulate the updating problem as an optimization problem. Because of the inexplicit input/output relationship between the candidate solutions and the error function's output, a robust and efficient optimization algorithm should be employed to evaluate the solution domain and find the global extremum with high speed and accuracy. This paper proposes a new multi-stage Selective Particle Swarm Optimization (SPSO) algorithm to solve the optimization problem. The proposed multi-stage strategy not only fixes the premature convergence of the original Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm, but also increases the speed of the search stage and reduces the corresponding computational costs, without changing or adding extra terms to the algorithm's formulation. Solving the introduced objective function with the proposed multi-stage SPSO leads to a smart feedback-wise and self-adjusting damage detection method, which can effectively assess the health of the structural systems. The performance and precision of the proposed method are verified and benchmarked against the original PSO and some of its most popular variants, including SPSO, DPSO, APSO, and MSPSO. For this purpose, two numerical examples of complex civil engineering structures under different damage patterns are studied. Comparative studies are also carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed method in the presence of measurement errors. Moreover, the robustness and accuracy of the method are validated by assessing the health of a six-story shear-type building structure tested on a shake table. The obtained results introduced the proposed method as an effective and robust damage detection method even if the first few vibration modes are utilized to form the objective function.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.23-39
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• 2013

In this article, a smart multifunctional optical system-on-a-chip (SOC) sensor platform is presented and its application for fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor interrogation in optical sensor networks is investigated. The smart SOC sensor platform consists of a superluminescent diode as a broadband source, a tunable microelectromechanical system (MEMS) based Fabry-P$\acute{e}$rot filter, photodetectors, and an integrated microcontroller for data acquisition, processing, and communication. Integrated with a wireless sensor network (WSN) module in a compact package, a smart optical sensor node is developed. The smart multifunctional sensor platform has the capability of interrogating different types of optical fiber sensors, including Fabry-P$\acute{e}$rot sensors and Bragg grating sensors. As a case study, the smart optical sensor platform is demonstrated to interrogate multiplexed FBG strain sensors. A time domain signal processing method is used to obtain the Bragg wavelength shift of two FBG strain sensors through sweeping the MEMS tunable Fabry-P$\acute{e}$rot filter. A tuning range of 46 nm and a tuning speed of 10 Hz are achieved. The smart optical sensor platform will open doors to many applications that require high performance optical WSNs.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.60 no.3
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• pp.529-545
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• 2016

In this article, the generalized coupled non-Fickian diffusion-thermoelasticity analysis is carried out using an analytical method. The transient behaviors of field variables, including mass concentration, temperature and displacement are studied in a strip, which is subjected to shock loading. The governing equations are derived using generalized coupled non-Fickian diffusion-thermoelasticity theory, which is based on Lord-Shulman theory of coupled thermoelasticity. The governing equations are transferred to the frequency domain using Laplace transform technique and then the field variables are obtained in analytical forms using the presented method. The field variables are eventually determined in time domain by employing the Talbot technique. The dynamic behaviors of mass concentration, temperature and displacement are studied in details. It is concluded that the presented analytical method has a high capability for simulating the wave propagation with finite speed in mass concentration field as well as for tracking thermoelastic waves. Furthermore, the obtained results are more realistic than that of others.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.283-297
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• 2015

Jacket-type offshore structures are always exposed to severe environmental conditions such as salt, high speed of current, wave, and wind compared with other onshore structures. In spite of the importance of maintaining the structural integrity for an offshore structure, there are few cases to apply a structural health monitoring (SHM) system in practice. The impedance-based SHM is a kind of local SHM techniques and to date, numerous techniques and algorithms have been proposed for local SHM of real-scale structures. However, it still requires a significant challenge for practical applications to compensate unknown environmental effects and to extract only damage features from impedance signals. In this study, the impedance-based SHM was carried out on a 1/20-scaled model of an Uldolmok current power plant structure in Korea under changes in temperature and transverse loadings. Principal component analysis (PCA)-based approach was applied with a conventional damage index to eliminate environmental changes by removing principal components sensitive to them. Experimental results showed that the proposed approach is an effective tool for long-term SHM under significant environmental changes.