• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.355-368
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• 2005

Large and complex structures are being built now-a-days and, they are required to be functional even under extreme loading and environmental conditions. In order to meet the safety and maintenance demands, there is a need to build sensors integrated structural system, which can sense and provide necessary information about the structural response to complex loading and environment. Sophisticated tools have been developed for the design and construction of civil engineering structures. However, very little has been accomplished in the area of monitoring and rehabilitation. The employment of appropriate sensor is therefore crucial, and efforts must be directed towards non-destructive testing techniques that remain functional throughout the life of the structure. Fiber optic sensors are emerging as a superior non-destructive tool for evaluating the health of civil engineering structures. Flexibility, small in size and corrosion resistance of optical fibers allow them to be directly embedded in concrete structures. The inherent advantages of fiber optic sensors over conventional sensors include high resolution, ability to work in difficult environment, immunity from electromagnetic interference, large band width of signal, low noise and high sensitivity. This paper brings out the potential and current status of technology of fiber optic sensors for civil engineering applications. The importance of employing fiber optic sensors for health monitoring of civil engineering structures has been highlighted. Details of laboratory studies carried out on fiber optic strain sensors to assess their suitability for civil engineering applications are also covered.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.6 no.5_6
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• pp.505-524
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• 2010

Wireless structural monitoring systems consist of networks of wireless sensors installed to record the loading environment and corresponding response of large-scale civil structures. Wireless monitoring systems are desirable because they eliminate the need for costly and labor intensive installation of coaxial wiring in a structure. However, another advantageous characteristic of wireless sensors is their installation modularity. For example, wireless sensors can be easily and rapidly removed and reinstalled in new locations on a structure if the need arises. In this study, the reconfiguration of a rapid-to-deploy wireless structural monitoring system is proposed for monitoring short- and medium-span highway bridges. Narada wireless sensor nodes using power amplified radios are adopted to achieve long communication ranges. A network of twenty Narada wireless sensors is installed on the Yeondae Bridge (Korea) to measure the global response of the bridge to controlled truck loadings. To attain acceleration measurements in a large number of locations on the bridge, the wireless monitoring system is installed three times, with each installation concentrating sensors in one localized area of the bridge. Analysis of measurement data after installation of the three monitoring system configurations leads to reliable estimation of the bridge modal properties, including mode shapes.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.299-314
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• 2023

Long-gauge carbon fiber line (CFL) sensors have received considerable attention in the past decade. However, there is still a need for an in-depth investigation of their measuring accuracy. This study investigates the accuracy of carbon fiber line sensors to monitor and differentiate the flexural behavior of two beams, one reinforced with steel bars alone and the other reinforced with steel and basalt fiber-reinforced polymer bars. A distributed set of long-gauge carbon fiber line, Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG), and traditional strain gauge sensors was mounted on the tensile concrete surface of the studied beams to compare the results and assess the accuracies of the proposed sensors. The test beams were loaded monotonically under four-point bending loading until failure. Results indicated the importance of using long-gauge sensors in providing useful, accurate, and reliable information regarding global structural behavior, while point sensors are affected by local damage and strain concentrations. Furthermore, long-gauge carbon fiber line sensors demonstrated good agreement with the corresponding Fiber Bragg Grating sensors with acceptable accuracy, thereby exhibiting potential for application in monitoring the health of large-scale structures.

• 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.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.191-199
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• 2000

Since a few decade ago, there has been a demand on the safety monitoring of civil infrastructures, such as bridges, in order to prevent possibly occurrable disaster due to human negligence. The main cause for a failure or collapse of structures is absolutely a structural crack. For the reason, it is necessary to monitor the propagation of a structural crack. But a crack in bridges is gradually propagating with the traffic loads through the long term. There are lots of sensors to monitor structural cracks on bridges, but much information about them was not given so far. Therefore, in this study, the experimental comparison for long-term monitoring sensors, especially, strain measurement sensors, in terms of duration, temperature dependency, accuracy was made extensively.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.509-525
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• 2018

Sensors and systems in Civionics technology play an important role for continuously facilitating real-time structure monitoring systems by detecting and locating damage to or degradation of structures. An advanced materials, design processes, long-term sensing ability of sensors, electromagnetic interference, sensor placement techniques, data acquisition and computation, temperature, harsh environments, and energy consumption are important issues related to sensors for structural health monitoring (SHM). This paper provides a comprehensive survey of various sensor technologies, sensor classes and sensor networks in Civionics research for existing SHM systems. The detailed classification of sensor categories, applications, networking features, ranges, sizes and energy consumptions are investigated, summarized, and tabulated along with corresponding key references. The current challenges facing typical sensors in Civionics research are illustrated with a brief discussion on the progress of SHM in future applications. The purpose of this review is to discuss all the types of sensors and systems used in SHM research to provide a sufficient background on the challenges and problems in optimizing design techniques and understanding infrastructure performance, behavior and current condition. It is observed that the most important factors determining the quality of sensors and systems and their reliability are the long-term sensing ability, data rate, types of processors, size, power consumption, operation frequency, etc. This review will hopefully lead to increased efforts toward the development of low-powered, highly efficient, high data rate, reliable sensors and systems for SHM.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.43-52
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• 2017

Structural health monitoring has drawn great attention in the field of civil engineering in past two decades. These structural health monitoring methods evaluate structural integrity through high-quality sensor measurements of structures. Due to electronic deterioration or aging problems, sensors may yield biased signals. Therefore, the objective of this study is to develop a fault detection method that identifies malfunctioning sensors in a sensor network. This method exploits the autoregressive modeling technique to generate a bank of Kalman estimators, and the faulty sensors are then recognized by comparing the measurements with these estimated signals. Three types of faults are considered in this study including the additive, multiplicative, and slowly drifting faults. To assess the effectiveness of detecting faulty sensors, a numerical example is provided, while an experimental investigation with faults added artificially is studied. As a result, the proposed method is capable of determining the faulty occurrences and types.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2003.04a
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• pp.269-278
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• 2003

In this study, the method of the finite element modeling for free vibration control of beam-type smart structures with bonded plate-type piezoelectric sensors and actuators is proposed. Constitutive equations for the direct piezoelectric effect and converse piezoelectric effect of piezoelectric materials are considered. By using the variational principle, the equations of motion for the smart beam finite element are derived, The proposed 2-node beam finite element is an isoparametric element based on Timoshenko beam theory. Therefore, by analyzing beam-type smart structures with smart beam finite elements, it is possible to simulate the control of the structural behavior by applying voltages to piezoelectric actuators and monitoring of the structural behavior by sensing voltages of piezoelectric sensors. By using the smart beam finite element and constant-gain feed back control scheme, the formulation of the free vibration control for the beam structures with bonded plate-type piezoelectric sensors and actuators is proposed.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.1147-1167
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• 2015

Wireless smart sensors, which have become popular for monitoring applications, are an attractive option for implementing structural control systems, due to their onboard sensing, processing, and communication capabilities. However, wireless smart sensors pose inherent challenges for control, including delays from communication, acquisition hardware, and processing time. Previous research in wireless control, which focused on semi-active systems, has found that sampling rate along with time delays can significantly impact control performance. However, because semi-active systems are guaranteed stable, these issues are typically neglected in the control design. This work achieves active control with smart sensors in an experimental setting. Because active systems are not inherently stable, all the elements of the control loop must be addressed, including data acquisition hardware, processing performance, and control design at slow sampling rates. The sensing hardware is shown to have a significant impact on the control design and performance. Ultimately, the smart sensor active control system achieves comparable performance to the traditional tethered system.

• Proceedings of the Korea Concrete Institute Conference
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• 2004.05a
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• pp.428-431
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• 2004

Smart structural system is defined as structural system with a certain-level of autonomy relying on the embedded functions of sensors, actuators and processors, that can automatically adjust structural characteristics, in response to the change in external disturbance and environments, toward structural safety and serviceability as well as the extension of structural service life. In this study, carbon and glass hybrid fiber materials were investigated fundamentally for the applicability of self diagnosis in smart concrete structural system as embedded functions of sensors.