• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.65-75
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• 2015

Among the destruction instances of half-through arch bridges, the shorter hangers are more likely to be ruined. For a thorough investigation of the hanger system durability, we have studied vehicle impact effect on hangers with vehicle-bridge coupling method for a half-through concrete-filled-steel-tube arch bridge. A numerical method has been applied to simulate the variation of dynamic internal force (stress) in hangers under different vehicle speeds and road surface roughness. The characteristics and differences in impact effect among hangers with different length (position) are compared. The impact effect is further analyzed comprehensively based on the vehicle speed distribution model. Our results show that the dynamic internal force induced by moving vehicles inside the shorter hangers is significantly greater than that inside the longer ones. The largest difference of dynamic internal force among the hangers could be as high as 28%. Our results well explained a common phenomenon in several hanger damage accidents occurred in China. This work forms a basis for hanger system's fatigue analysis and service life evaluation. It also provides a reference to the design, management, maintenance, monitoring, and evaluation for this kind of bridge.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.1-18
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• 2015

Traditionally, it is not easy to carry out tests to identify modal parameters from existing railway bridges because of the testing conditions and complicated nature of civil structures. A six year (2007-2012) research program was conducted to monitor a group of 25 railway bridges. One of the tasks was to devise guidelines for identifying their modal parameters. This paper presents the experience acquired from such identification. The modal analysis of four representative bridges of this group is reported, which include B5, B15, B20 and B58A, crossing the Caraj$\acute{a}$s railway in northern Brazil using three different excitations sources: drop weight, free vibration after train passage, and ambient conditions. To extract the dynamic parameters from the recorded data, Stochastic Subspace Identification and Frequency Domain Decomposition methods were used. Finite-element models were constructed to facilitate the dynamic measurements. The results show good agreement between the measured and computed natural frequencies and mode shapes. The findings provide some guidelines on methods of excitation, record length of time, methods of modal analysis including the use of projected channel and harmonic detection, helping researchers and maintenance teams obtain good dynamic characteristics from measurement data.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.115-127
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• 2016

It is a challenging problem of assessing the location and extent of structural damages with vibration measurements. In this paper, an improved Extended Kalman filter (EKF) with Tikhonov regularization is proposed to identify structural damages. The state vector of EKF consists of the initial values of modal coordinates and damage parameters of structural elements, therefore the recursive formulas of EKF are simplified and modal truncation technique can be used to reduce the dimension of the state vector. Then Tikhonov regularization is introduced into EKF to restrain the effect of the measurement noise for improving the solution of ill-posed inverse problems. Numerical simulations of a seven-story shear-beam structure and a simply-supported beam show that the proposed method has good robustness and can identify the single or multiple damages accurately with the unknown initial structural state.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.297-314
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• 2016

As the study of internal corrosion of pipeline need a large number of experiments as well as long time, so there is a need for new computational technique to expand the spectrum of the results and to save time. The present work represents a new non-destructive evaluation (NDE) technique for detecting the internal corrosion inside pipeline by evaluating the dielectric properties of steel pipe at room temperature by using electrical capacitance sensor (ECS), then predict the effect of pipeline environment temperature (${\theta}$) on the corrosion rates by designing an efficient artificial neural network (ANN) architecture. ECS consists of number of electrodes mounted on the outer surface of pipeline, the sensor shape, electrode configuration, and the number of electrodes that comprise three key elements of two dimensional capacitance sensors are illustrated. The variation in the dielectric signatures was employed to design electrical capacitance sensor (ECS) with high sensitivity to detect such defects. The rules of 24-electrode sensor parameters such as capacitance, capacitance change, and change rate of capacitance are discussed by ANSYS and MATLAB, which are combined to simulate sensor characteristic. A feed-forward neural network (FFNN) structure are applied, trained and tested to predict the finite element (FE) results of corrosion rates under room temperature, and then used the trained FFNN to predict corrosion rates at different temperature using MATLAB neural network toolbox. The FE results are in excellent agreement with an FFNN results, thus validating the accuracy and reliability of the proposed technique and leads to better understanding of the corrosion mechanism under different pipeline environmental temperature.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.277-296
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• 2016

There is a need for rapid and objective assessment of concrete bridge decks for maintenance decision making. Infrared Thermography (IRT) has great potential to identify deck delaminations more objectively than routine visual inspections or chain drag tests. In addition, it is possible to collect reliable data rapidly with appropriate IRT cameras attached to vehicles and the data are analyzed effectively. This research compares three infrared cameras with different specifications at different times and speeds for data collection, and explores several factors affecting the utilization of IRT in regards to subsurface damage detection in concrete structures, specifically when the IRT is utilized for high-speed bridge deck inspection at normal driving speeds. These results show that IRT can detect up to 2.54 cm delamination from the concrete surface at any time period. It is observed that nighttime would be the most suitable time frame with less false detections and interferences from the sunlight and less adverse effect due to direct sunlight, making more "noise" for the IRT results. This study also revealed two important factors of camera specifications for high-speed inspection by IRT as shorter integration time and higher pixel resolution.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.233-257
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• 2016

This paper provides an overview on development of long-span bridges monitoring in Japan, with emphasis on monitoring strategies, types of monitoring system, and effective utilization of monitoring data. Because of severe environment condition such as high seismic activity and strong wind, bridge monitoring systems in Japan historically put more emphasis on structural evaluation against extreme events. Monitoring data were used to verify design assumptions, update specifications, and facilitate the efficacy of vibration control system. These were among the first objectives of instrumentation of long-span bridges in a framework of monitoring system in Japan. Later, monitoring systems were also utilized to evaluate structural performance under various environment and loading conditions, and to detect the possible structural deterioration over the age of structures. Monitoring systems are also employed as the basis of investigation and decision making for structural repair and/or retrofit when required. More recent interest has been to further extend application of monitoring to facilitate operation and maintenance, through rationalization of risk and asset management by utilizing monitoring data. The paper describes strategies and several examples of monitoring system and lessons learned from structural monitoring of long-span bridges in Japan.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.195-214
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• 2016

Monitoring of impact loads is a very important technique in the field of structural health monitoring (SHM). However, in most cases it is not possible to measure impact events directly, so they need to be reconstructed. Impact load reconstruction refers to the problem of estimating an input to a dynamic system when the system output and the impulse response function are usually known. Generally this leads to a so called ill-posed inverse problem. It is reasonable to use prior knowledge of the force in order to develop more suitable reconstruction strategies and to increase accuracy. An impact event is characterized by a short time duration and a spatial concentration. Moreover the force time history of an impact has a specific shape, which also can be taken into account. In this contribution these properties of the external force are employed to create a sample-force-dictionary and thus to transform the ill-posed problem into a sparse recovery task. The sparse solution is acquired by solving a minimization problem known as basis pursuit denoising (BPDN). The reconstruction approach shown here is capable to estimate simultaneously the magnitude of the impact and the impact location, with a minimum number of accelerometers. The possibility of reconstructing the impact based on a noisy output signal is first demonstrated with simulated measurements of a simple beam structure. Then an experimental investigation of a real beam is performed.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.91-114
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• 2016

In this paper, recent research trends and activities on structural health monitoring (SHM) of civil infrastructure in Korea are reviewed. Recently, there has been increasing need for adopting smart sensing technologies to SHM, so this review focuses on smart sensing, monitoring, and assessment for civil infrastructure. Firstly, the research activities on smart sensor technology is reviewed including optical fiber sensors, piezoelectric sensors, wireless smart sensors, and vision-based sensing system. Then, a brief overview is given to the recent advances in smart monitoring and assessment techniques such as vibration-based global monitoring techniques, local monitoring with piezoelectric materials, decentralized monitoring techniques for wireless sensors, wireless power supply and energy harvest. Finally, recent joint SHM activities on several test beds in Korea are discussed to share the up-to-date information and to promote the smart sensors and monitoring technologies for applications to civil infrastructure. It includes a Korea-US joint research on test bridges of the Korea Expressway Corporation (KEC), a Korea-US-Japan joint research on Jindo cable-stayed bridge, and a comparative study for cable tension measurement techniques on Hwamyung cable-stayed bridge, and a campaign test for displacement measurement techniques on Sorok suspension bridge.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.51-69
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• 2016

Monitoring the performance and estimating the remaining useful life of aging civil infrastructure in the United States has been identified as a major objective in the civil engineering community. Structural health monitoring has emerged as a central tool to fulfill this objective. This paper presents a review of the major structural monitoring programs that have been recently implemented in the United States, focusing on the integrity and performance assessment of large-scale structural systems. Applications where response data from a monitoring program have been used to detect and correct structural deficiencies are highlighted. These applications include (but are not limited to): i) Post-earthquake damage assessment of buildings and bridges; ii) Monitoring of cables vibration in cable-stayed bridges; iii) Evaluation of the effectiveness of technologies for retrofit and seismic protection, such as base isolation systems; and iv) Structural damage assessment of bridges after impact loads resulting from ship collisions. These and many other applications show that a structural health monitoring program is a powerful tool for structural damage and condition assessment, that can be used as part of a comprehensive decision-making process about possible actions that can be undertaken in a large-scale civil infrastructure system after potentially damaging events.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.33-49
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• 2016

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has been attracting numerous research efforts around the world because it targets at monitoring structural conditions and performance to prevent catastrophic failure, and to provide quantitative data for engineers and infrastructure owners to design a reliable and economical asset management strategy. In the past decade, with supports from Australian Research Council (ARC), Cooperative Research Center for Infrastructure and Engineering Asset Management (CIEAM), CSIRO and industry partners, intensive research works have been conducted in the School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering, University of Western Australia and Centre for Infrastructural Monitoring and Protection, Curtin University on various techniques of SHM. The researches include the development of hardware, software and various algorithms, such as various signal processing techniques for operational modal analysis, modal analysis toolbox, non-model based methods for assessing the shear connection in composite bridges and identifying the free spanning and supports conditions of pipelines, vibration based structural damage identification and model updating approaches considering uncertainty and noise effects, structural identification under moving loads, guided wave propagation technique for detecting debonding damage, and relative displacement sensors for SHM in composite and steel truss bridges. This paper aims at summarizing and reviewing the recent research advances on SHM of civil infrastructure in Western Australia.