• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제87권3호
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• pp.211-219
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• 2023

The structural health of a pipeline is usually assessed by visual inspection. In addition to the fact that this method is expensive and time consuming, inspection of the whole structure is not possible due to limited access to some points. Therefore, adopting a damage detection method without the mentioned limitations is important in order to increase the safety of the structure. In recent years, vibration-based methods have been used to detect damage. These methods detect structural defects based on the fact that the dynamic responses of the structure will change due to damage existence. Therefore, the location and extent of damage, before and after the damage, are determined. In this study, fuzzy genetic algorithm has been used to monitor the structural health of the pipeline to create a fuzzy automated system and all kinds of possible failure scenarios that can occur for the structure. For this purpose, the results of an experimental model have been used. Its numerical model is generated in ABAQUS software and the results of the analysis are used in the fuzzy genetic algorithm. Results show that the system is more accurate in detecting high-intensity damages, and the use of higher frequency modes helps to increase accuracy. Moreover, the system considers the damage in symmetric regions with the same degree of membership. To deal with the uncertainties, some error values are added, which are observed to be negligible up to 10% of the error.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• 제8권3호
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• pp.485-509
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• 2015

This paper presents the experimental results obtained by applying frequency-domain structural health monitoring techniques to assess the damage suffered on a special type of damper called Web Plastifying Damper (WPD). The WPD is a hysteretic type energy dissipator recently developed for the passive control of structures subjected to earthquakes. It consists of several I-section steel segments connected in parallel. The energy is dissipated through plastic deformations of the web of the I-sections, which constitute the dissipative parts of the damper. WPDs were subjected to successive histories of dynamically-imposed cyclic deformations of increasing magnitude with the shaking table of the University of Granada. To assess the damage to the web of the I-section steel segments after each history of loading, a new damage index called Area Index of Damage (AID) was obtained from simple vibration tests. The vibration signals were acquired by means of piezoelectric sensors attached on the I-sections, and non-parametric statistical methods were applied to calculate AID in terms of changes in frequency response functions. The damage index AID was correlated with another energy-based damage index -ID- which past research has proven to accurately characterize the level of mechanical damage. The ID is rooted in the decomposition of the load-displacement curve experienced by the damper into the so-called skeleton and Bauschinger parts. ID predicts the level of damage and the proximity to failure of the damper accurately, but it requires costly instrumentation. The experiments reported in this paper demonstrate a good correlation between AID and ID in a realistic seismic loading scenario consisting of dynamically applied arbitrary cyclic loads. Based on this correlation, it is possible to estimate ID indirectly from the AID, which calls for much simpler and less expensive instrumentation.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제42권3호
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• pp.425-448
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• 2012

In this paper, a new damage detection and quantification method has been presented to perform detection and quantification of structural damage under ambient vibration loadings. To extract modal properties of the structural system under ambient excitation, natural excitation technique (NExT) and eigensystem realization algorithm (ERA) are employed. Sensitivity matrices of the dynamic residual force vector have been derived and used in the parameter subset selection method to identify multiple damaged locations. In the sequel, the steady state genetic algorithm (SSGA) is used to determine quantified levels of the identified damage by minimizing errors in the modal flexibility matrix. In this study, performance of the proposed damage detection and quantification methodology is evaluated using a finite element model of a truss structure with considerations of possible experimental errors and noises. A series of numerical examples with five different damage scenarios including a challengingly small damage level demonstrates that the proposed methodology can efficaciously detect and quantify damage under noisy ambient vibrations.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• 제11권2호
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• pp.149-171
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• 2024

Drive-by monitoring (also known as indirect monitoring or mobile sensing) of bridges has obvious advantages when compared to other approaches of Structural Health Monitoring. The underlying concept involves leveraging the coupling between the vertical vibrations of the bridge and those generated in the passing vehicle. In this scenario, the vehicle serves as both the initiator and recipient of the vibrations, which can provide information on the structural condition of the bridge. In the literature, a wide range of methods has been proposed, primarily focused on highway bridges. However, limited research has been published to assess the suitability of indirect methods for monitoring railway bridges, bounded to numerical studies based on theoretical simulations and, rarely, on experimental investigations. The aim of this work is to contribute to filling this gap and explore the feasibility of implementing drive-by monitoring for railway bridges using in-service vehicles and discuss its potential applicability, from theoretical and practical point of view, with illustration through real case studies from the Moroccan railway network.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제54권1호
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• pp.105-119
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• 2015

Structural damage detection using modal strain energy (MSE) is one of the most efficient and reliable structural health monitoring techniques. However, some of the existing MSE methods have been validated for special types of structures such as beams or steel truss bridges which demands improving the available methods. The purpose of this study is to improve an efficient modal strain energy method to detect and quantify the damage in complex structures at early stage of formation. In this paper, a modal strain energy method was mathematically developed and then numerically applied to a fixed-end beam and a three-story frame including single and multiple damage scenarios in absence and presence of up to five per cent noise. For each damage scenario, all mode shapes and natural frequencies of intact structures and the first five mode shapes of assumed damaged structures were obtained using STRAND7. The derived mode shapes of each intact and damaged structure at any damage scenario were then separately used in the improved formulation using MATLAB to detect the location and quantify the severity of damage as compared to those obtained from previous method. It was found that the improved method is more accurate, efficient and convergent than its predecessors. The outcomes of this study can be safely and inexpensively used for structural health monitoring to minimize the loss of lives and property by identifying the unforeseen structural damages.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제32권4호
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• pp.489-500
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• 2009

The aim of this paper is to compare wavelet, kurtosis and pseudofractal based techniques for structural health monitoring in the presence of measurement noise. A detailed comparison and assessment of these techniques have been carried out in this paper through numerical experiments for the calibration of damage extent of a simply supported beam with an open crack serving as an illustrative example. The numerical experiments are deemed critical due to limited amount of experimental data available in the field of singularity based detection of damage. A continuous detectibility map has been proposed for comparing various techniques qualitatively. Efficiency surfaces have been constructed for wavelet, kurtosis and pseudofractal based calibration of damage extent as a function of damage location and measurement noise level. Levels of noise have been identified for each technique where a sudden drop of calibration efficiency is observed marking the onset of damage masking regime by measurement noise.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제26권3호
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• pp.315-341
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• 2007

A sudden change of stiffness in a structure, associated with the events such as weld fracture and brace breakage, will cause a discontinuity in acceleration response time histories recorded in the vicinity of damage location at damage time instant. A new damage index is proposed and implemented in this paper to detect the damage time instant, location, and severity of a structure due to a sudden change of structural stiffness. The proposed damage index is suitable for online structural health monitoring applications. It can also be used in conjunction with the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) for damage detection without using the intermittency check. Numerical simulation using a five-story shear building under different types of excitation is executed to assess the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed damage index and damage detection approach for the building at different damage levels. The sensitivity of the damage index to the intensity and frequency range of measurement noise is also examined. The results from this study demonstrate that the damage index and damage detection approach proposed can accurately identify the damage time instant and location in the building due to a sudden loss of stiffness if measurement noise is below a certain level. The relation between the damage severity and the proposed damage index is linear. The wavelet-transform (WT) and the EMD with intermittency check are also applied to the same building for the comparison of detection efficiency between the proposed approach, the WT and the EMD.

• Advances in Computational Design
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• 제1권4호
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• pp.315-327
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• 2016

Damage detection and localisation in structures is essential since it can be a means for preventive maintenance of those structures under service conditions. The use of structural modal data for detecting the damage is one of the most efficient methods. This paper presents comparative performance of various state-of-the-art meta-heuristics for use in structural damage detection based on changes in modal data. The metaheuristics include differential evolution (DE), artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC), real-code ant colony optimisation (ACOR), charged system search (ChSS), league championship algorithm (LCA), simulated annealing (SA), particle swarm optimisation (PSO), evolution strategies (ES), teaching-learning-based optimisation (TLBO), adaptive differential evolution (JADE), evolution strategy with covariance matrix adaptation (CMAES), success-history based adaptive differential evolution (SHADE) and SHADE with linear population size reduction (L-SHADE). Three truss structures are used to pose several test problems for structural damage detection. The meta-heuristics are then used to solve the test problems treated as optimisation problems. Comparative performance is carried out where the statistically best algorithms are identified.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제6권1호
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• pp.17-27
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• 2010

The approach to damage detection and localization adopted in this paper is based on a statistical comparison of models built from the response time histories collected at different stages during the structure lifetime. Some of these time histories are known to have been recorded when the structural system was undamaged. The consistency of the models associated to two different stages, both undamaged, is first recognized. By contrast, the method detects the discrepancies between the models from measurements collected for a damaged situation and for the undamaged reference situation. The damage detection and localization is pursued by a comparison of the SSE (sum of the squared errors) histograms. The validity of the proposed approach is tested by applying it to the analytical benchmark problem developed by the ASCE Task Group on Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). In the paper, the results of the benchmark studies are presented and the performance of the method is discussed.

• 한국철도학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국철도학회 2008년도 춘계학술대회 논문집
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• pp.56-64
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• 2008

To maintain effectively the functionality of major railroad facilities such as bridges, identifying and evaluating damage in a structure and taking appropriate action via continuous structural health monitoring are very important. However, most damage identification methods for structural health monitoring developed to date utilize modal domain responses which inevitably contain errors in transforming the domain of responses. In this paper, a damage identification method using time-domain operational deflection shapes is proposed. Since the proposed method utilizes time-domain responses, the error in the process of transformation to response domain can be avoided, and the accuracy of structural health evaluation can be improved. The feasibility of the proposed method is verified via a numerical example of a simple bridge structure.