• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• 제10권2호
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• pp.133-154
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• 2023

Obscured structural members are mostly under-evaluated during condition assessment due to lack of visual inspection capability. Insufficient information about the integrity of these structural members poses a significant risk for public safety. Time domain reflectometry (TDR) is a novel approach in structural health monitoring (SHM). Ordinary coaxial cables "as is" without a major modification are not suitable for SHM with TDR. The objective of this study is to propose a practical and cost-effective modification approach to commercially available coaxial cables in order to use them as a "cable sensor" for damage detection with the TDR equipment for obscured structural members. The experimental validation and assessment of the proposed modification approach was achieved by conducting 3-point bending tests of the model piles as a representative obscured structural member. It can be noted that the RG59/U-6 and RG6/U-4 cable sensors expose higher strain sensitivity in comparison with non-modified "as is" versions of the cables used. As a result, the cable sensors have the capability of sensing both the presence and the location of a structural damage with a maximum aberration of 3 cm. Furthermore, the crack development can be monitored by the RG59/U-6 cable sensor with a simple calibration.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제17권6호
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• pp.995-1015
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• 2016

In the design and condition assessment of bridges, it is usually necessary to take into consideration the extreme conditions which are not expected to occur within a short time period and thus require an extrapolation from observations of limited duration. Long-term structural health monitoring (SHM) provides a rich database to evaluate the extreme conditions. This paper focuses on the extrapolation of extreme traffic load effects on bridges using long-term monitoring data of structural strain. The suspension Tsing Ma Bridge (TMB), which carries both highway and railway traffic and is instrumented with a long-term SHM system, is taken as a testbed for the present study. Two popular extreme value extrapolation methods: the block maxima approach and the peaks-over-threshold approach, are employed to extrapolate the extreme stresses induced by highway traffic and railway traffic, respectively. Characteristic values of the extreme stresses with a return period of 120 years (the design life of the bridge) obtained by the two methods are compared. It is found that the extrapolated extreme stresses are robust to the extrapolation technique. It may owe to the richness and good quality of the long-term strain data acquired. These characteristic extremes are also compared with the design values and found to be much smaller than the design values, indicating conservative design values of traffic loading and a safe traffic-loading condition of the bridge. The results of this study can be used as a reference for the design and condition assessment of similar bridges carrying heavy traffic, analogous to the TMB.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• 제4권4호
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• pp.381-396
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• 2017

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is a necessity for reliable and efficient functioning of engineering systems. Damage detection (DD) is a crucial component of any SHM system. Lamb waves are a popular means to DD owing to their sensitivity to small damages over a substantial length. This typically involves an active sensing paradigm in a pitch-catch setting, that involves two piezo-sensors, a transmitter and a receiver. In this paper, we propose a data-intensive DD approach for beam structures using high frequency signals acquired from beams in a pitch-catch setting. The key idea is to develop a statistical learning-based approach, that harnesses the inherent sparsity in the problem. The proposed approach performs damage detection, localization in beams. In addition, quantification is possible too with prior calibration. We demonstrate numerically that the proposed approach achieves 100% accuracy in detection and localization even with a signal to noise ratio of 25 dB.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제18권4호
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• pp.643-662
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• 2016

The monitoring of structural integrity of pipeline tapered thread connections is of great significance in terms of safe operation in the industry. In order to detect effectively the loosening degree of tapered thread connection, an active sensing method using piezoceramic transducers was developed based on time reversal technique in this paper. As the piezoeramic transducers can be either as actuators or sensors to generate or detect stress waves, the energy transmission for tapered thread connection was analyzed. Subsequently, the detection principle for tapered thread connection based on time reversal was introduced. Finally, the inherent relationship between the contact area and tightness degree of tapered thread connection for the pipe structural model was investigated. Seven different contact area scenarios were tested. Each scenario was created by loosening connectors ranging from 3 turns to 4.5 turns in the right tapered threads when the contact area in the left tapered threads were 4.5 turns. The experiments were separately conducted with a highly noisy environment and various excitation signal amplitudes. The results show the focused peaks based on time reversal have the monotonously rising trend with the increase of the contact areas of tapered threads within an acceptable monitoring resolution for metal pipes. Compared with the energy method, the proposed time reversal based method to monitor tapered threads loosening demonstrates to be more robust in rejecting noise in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) applications.

• 한국전산구조공학회논문집
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• 제33권1호
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• pp.55-61
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• 2020

국내 고도성장기 이후 본격 건설되기 시작한 사회 기반 시설물은 노후화가 빠르게 진행되고 있다. 특히 사고 발생 시 대량 인명 피해로 직결될 수 있는 교량, 터널 등의 대형 구조물에 대한 안전성 평가가 필요하다. 하지만 기존의 유선 센서 기반의 Structural Health Monitoring(SHM)을 개선한 무선 스마트 센서 네트워크는 짧은 신호 도달거리로 인해 경제적이고 효율적인 시스템 구축이 힘들다. 따라서 LoRa LPWAN 시스템은 사물인터넷의 확산과 더불어 저전력 장거리 통신이 각광을 받고 있으며, 이를 구조 건전성 모니터링에 응용함으로써 경제적이면서도 효율적인 모니터링 시스템 구축이 가능하다. 본 연구에서는 LoRa LPWAN 기반의 무선 계측센서 기술동향을 조사하였으며, LoRa LPWAN 기반의 무선 계측센서 설치 및 유지관리 방안을 제안한다.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• 제22권2호
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• pp.185-201
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• 2022

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is used to provide reliable information about the structure's integrity in near realtime following extreme incidents such as earthquakes, considering the inevitable aging and degradation that occurs in operating environments. This paper experimentally investigates an integrated wireless sensor network (Wi-SN) based monitoring technique for damage detection in concrete structures. An effective SHM technique can be used to detect potential structural damage based on post-earthquake data. Two novel methods are proposed for damage detection in reinforced concrete (RC) building structures including: (i) Jerk Energy Method (JEM), which is based on time-domain analysis, and (ii) Modal Contributing Parameter (MCP), which is based on frequency-domain analysis. Wireless accelerometer sensors are installed at each story level to monitor the dynamic responses from the building structure. Prior knowledge of the initial state (immediately after construction) of the structure is not required in these methods. Proposed methods only use responses recorded during ambient vibration state (i.e., operational state) to estimate the damage index. Herein, the experimental studies serve as an illustration of the procedures. In particular, (i) a 3-story shear-type steel frame model is analyzed for several damage scenarios and (ii) 2-story RC scaled down (at 1/6th) building models, simulated and verified under experimental tests on a shaking table. As a result, in addition to the usual benefits like system adaptability, and cost-effectiveness, the proposed sensing system does not require a cluster of sensors. The spatial information in the real-time recorded data is used in global damage identification stage of SHM. Whereas in next stage of SHM, the damage is detected at the story level. Experimental results also show the efficiency and superior performance of the proposed measuring techniques.

• International Journal of Concrete Structures and Materials
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• 제3권1호
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• pp.33-37
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• 2009

Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors already have been the focus for structural health monitoring (SHM) due to their distinguishing advantages. However, as bare optical fiber is very fragile, bare FBG strain sensor without encapsulation can not properly be applied in practical infrastructures. Therefore encapsulation techniques for making encapsulated FBG strain sensor show very important in pushing forward the application of FBG strain sensors in SHM. In this paper, a simplified approximate method to analyze the stress transferring rules for embedded FBG strain sensors in concrete monitoring is put forward according to mechanics of composite materials. Shear lag theory is applied to analyze the stress transferring rule of embedded FBG strain sensor in measured host material at the first time. The measured host objects (concrete) and the encapsulated FBG strain sensor are regarded as a composite, and then the stress transfer formula and stress transfer coefficient of encapsulated FBG strain sensor are obtained.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제30권6호
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• pp.649-659
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• 2022

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) researchers have identified Augmented Reality (AR) as a new technology that can assist inspections. Post-seismic structural inspections are conducted to evaluate the safety level of the damaged structures. Quantification of nearby structural changes over short-term and long-term periods can provide building inspectors with information to improve their safety. This paper proposes a Time Machine Measure (TMM) application based on an Augmented Reality (AR) Head-Mounted-Device (HMD) platform. The primary function of TMM is to restore the saved meshes of a past environment and overlay them onto the real environment so that inspectors can intuitively measure dynamic structural deformation and other environmental movements. The proposed TMM application was verified by demo experiments simulating a real inspection environment.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제5권4호
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• pp.317-328
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• 2009

Current maintenance operations and integrity checks on a wide array of structures require personnel entry into normally-inaccessible or hazardous areas to perform necessary nondestructive inspections. To gain access for these inspections, structure must be disassembled and removed or personnel must be transported to remote locations. The use of in-situ sensors, coupled with remote interrogation, can be employed to overcome a myriad of inspection impediments stemming from accessibility limitations, complex geometries, the location and depth of hidden damage, and the isolated location of the structure. Furthermore, prevention of unexpected flaw growth and structural failure could be improved if on-board health monitoring systems were used to more regularly assess structural integrity. A research program has been completed to develop and validate Comparative Vacuum Monitoring (CVM) Sensors for surface crack detection. Statistical methods using one-sided tolerance intervals were employed to derive Probability of Detection (POD) levels for a wide array of application scenarios. Multi-year field tests were also conducted to study the deployment and long-term operation of CVM sensors on aircraft. This paper presents the quantitative crack detection capabilities of the CVM sensor, its performance in actual flight environments, and the prospects for structural health monitoring applications on aircraft and other civil structures.

• 한국소음진동공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국소음진동공학회 2007년도 추계학술대회논문집
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• pp.1382-1385
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• 2007

In this paper, we study about the measuring algorithm that can implement Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) more efficiently by two measurement methods using smart sensor. Through the impedance measurement method, the damage condition of structures on wide area is monitored first, and then it changes the mode to guided wave measurement mode by mode switching algorithm when impedance measurement mode detects abnormal signals. Efficient handling of the real-time data would be available by analyzing location and shape of damage through guided wave measurement.