• Explosives and Blasting
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.40-43
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• 2015

In this case study, a S/W optimized for ground vibration monitoring and analysis was developed. It was applied at vibrating compaction works for the ground improvement needed for the expansion of terminal 5 in Chagi International Airport in Singapore. The possible application of the new vibration analysis software to similar works like pile driving and the capability of long term and real time of the repeated wave vibration at seawalls, the vibration occurring from large structures like super tall buildings, tunnels, long cable hanging bridges, and etc were investigated.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.285-299
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• 2020

Long term structural health monitoring has gained wide attention among civil engineers in recent years due to the scale and severity of infrastructure deterioration. Establishing effective damage indicators and proposing enhanced monitoring methods are of great interests to the engineering practices. In the case of bridge health monitoring, long term structural vibration measurement has been acknowledged to be quite useful and utilized in the planning of maintenance works. Previous researches are majorly concentrated on linear time series models for the measurement, whereas nonlinear dependences among the measurement are not carefully considered. In this paper, a new bridge health monitoring method is proposed based on the use of long term vibration measurement. A combination of the fundamental ARMA model and copula theory is investigated for the first time in detecting bridge structural damages. The concept is applied to a real engineering practice in Japan. The efficiency and accuracy of the copula based damage indicator is analyzed and compared in different window sizes. The performance of the copula based indicator is discussed based on the damage detection rate between the intact structural condition and the damaged structural condition.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.7 no.5
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• pp.349-363
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• 2011

To assess the performance of a structure requires the measurement of global and relative displacements at critical points across the structure. They should be obtained in real time and in all weather condition. A Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) could satisfy the last two requirements. The American Global Position System (GPS) provides long term acquisitions with sampling rates sufficient to track the displacement of long period structures. The accuracy is of the order of sub-centimetres. The steel building which hosts the authors' laboratory is the reference case-study within this paper. First a comparison of data collected by GPS sensor units with data recorded by tri-axial accelerometers is carried out when dynamic vibrations are induced in the structure by movements of the internal bridge-crane. The elaborations from the GPS position readings are then compared with the results obtained by a Finite Element (FE) numerical simulation. The purposes are: i) to realize a refinement of the structural parameters which characterize the building and ii) to outline a suitable way for processing GPS data toward structural monitoring.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.1015-1039
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• 2014

The widening project on Freeway No.1 in Taiwan has a total length of roughly 14 kilometers, and includes three special bridges, namely a 216 m long-span bridge crossing the original freeway, an F-bent double decked bridge in a co-constructed section, and a steel and prestressed concrete composite bridge. This study employed in-situ monitoring in conjunction with numerical modeling to establish a real-time monitoring system for the three bridges. In order to determine the initial static and dynamic behavior of the real bridges, forced vibration experiments, in-situ static load experiments, and dynamic load experiments were first carried out on the newly-constructed bridges before they went into use. Structural models of the bridges were then established using the finite element method, and in-situ vehicle load weight, arrangement, and speed were taken into consideration when performing comparisons employing data obtained from experimental measurements. The results showed consistency between the analytical simulations and experimental data. After determining a bridge's initial state, the proposed in-situ monitoring system, which is employed in conjunction with the established finite element model, can be utilized to assess the safety of a bridge's members, providing useful reference information to bridge management agencies.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.34 no.5
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• pp.301-308
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• 2021

It is important to develop a digital SOC (Social Overhead Capital) maintenance system for preemptive maintenance in response to the rapid aging of social infrastructures. Abnormal signals induced from structures can be detected quickly and optimal decisions can be made promptly using IoT sensors deployed on the structures. In this study, a digital SOC monitoring system incorporating a multimetric IoT sensor was developed for long-term monitoring, for use in cloud-computing server for automated and powerful data analysis, and for establishing databases to perform : (1) multimetric sensing, (2) long-term operation, and (3) LTE-based direct communication. The developed sensor had three axes of acceleration, and five axes of strain sensing channels for multimetric sensing, and had an event-driven power management system that activated the sensors only when vibration exceeded a predetermined limit, or the timer was triggered. The power management system could reduce power consumption, and an additional solar panel charging could enable long-term operation. Data from the sensors were transmitted to the server in real-time via low-power LTE-CAT M1 communication, which does not require an additional gateway device. Furthermore, the cloud server was developed to receive multi-variable data from the sensor, and perform a displacement fusion algorithm to obtain reference-free structural displacement for ambient structural assessment. The proposed digital SOC system was experimentally validated on a steel railroad and concrete girder bridge.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.249-271
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• 2014

This paper presents a unique study of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) for the maintenance decision making about a real life movable bridge. The mechanical components of movable bridges are maintained on a scheduled basis. However, it is desired to have a condition-based maintenance by taking advantage of SHM. The main objective is to track the operation of a gearbox and a rack-pinion/open gear assembly, which are critical parts of bascule type movable bridges. Maintenance needs that may lead to major damage to these components needs to be identified and diagnosed timely since an early detection of faults may help avoid unexpected bridge closures or costly repairs. The fault prediction of the gearbox and rack-pinion/open gear is carried out using two types of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs): 1) Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Networks (MLP-NNs) and 2) Fuzzy Neural Networks (FNNs). Monitoring data is collected during regular opening and closing of the bridge as well as during artificially induced reversible damage conditions. Several statistical parameters are extracted from the time-domain vibration signals as characteristic features to be fed to the ANNs for constructing the MLP-NNs and FNNs independently. The required training and testing sets are obtained by processing the acceleration data for both damaged and undamaged condition of the aforementioned mechanical components. The performances of the developed ANNs are first evaluated using unseen test sets. Second, the selected networks are used for long-term condition evaluation of the rack-pinion/open gear of the movable bridge. It is shown that the vibration monitoring data with selected statistical parameters and particular network architectures give successful results to predict the undamaged and damaged condition of the bridge. It is also observed that the MLP-NNs performed better than the FNNs in the presented case. The successful results indicate that ANNs are promising tools for maintenance monitoring of movable bridge components and it is also shown that the ANN results can be employed in simple approach for day-to-day operation and maintenance of movable bridges.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.183-189
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• 2021

In recent years, active research has been devoted toward developing a monitoring system using ambient vibration data in order to quantitatively determine the deterioration occurring in a structure over a long period of time. This study developed a low-cost edge computing system that detects the abnormalities in structures by utilizing the dynamic characteristics acquired from the structure over the long term for ensemble learning. The system hardware consists of the Raspberry Pi, an accelerometer, an inclinometer, a GPS RTK module, and a LoRa communication module. The structural abnormality detection afforded by the ensemble learning using dynamic characteristics is verified using a laboratory-scale structure model vibration experiment. A real-time distributed processing algorithm with dynamic feature extraction based on the experiment is installed on the Raspberry Pi. Based on the stable operation of installed systems at the Community Service Center, Pohang-si, Korea, the validity of the developed system was verified on-site.

• 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.