• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.17 no.3_4
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• pp.429-444
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• 2004

The ambient vibration measurement is a kind of output data-only dynamic testing where the traffics and winds are used as agents responsible for natural or environmental excitation. Therefore an experimental modal analysis procedure for ambient vibration testing will need to base itself on output-only data. The modal analysis involving output-only measurements presents a challenge that requires the use of special modal identification technique, which can deal with very small magnitude of ambient vibration contaminated by noise. Two complementary modal analysis methods are implemented. They are rather simple peak picking (PP) method in frequency domain and more advanced stochastic subspace identification (SSI) method in time domain. This paper presents the application of ambient vibration testing and experimental modal analysis on large civil engineering structures. A 15 storey reinforced concrete shear core building and a concrete filled steel tubular arch bridge have been chosen as two case studies. The results have shown that both techniques can identify the frequencies effectively. The stochastic subspace identification technique can detect frequencies that may possibly be missed by the peak picking method and gives a more reasonable mode shapes in most cases.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.387-400
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• 1999

Damage detection in civil engineering structures using the change in dynamic system parameters has gained a lot of scientific interest during the last decade. By repeating a dynamic test on a structure after a certain time of use, the change in modal parameters can be used to quantify and qualify damages. To be able to use the modal parameters confidentially for damage evaluation, the effect of other parameters such as excitation type, ambient conditions,... should be considered. In this paper, the influence of excitation type on the dynamic system parameters of a highway prestressed concrete bridge is investigated. The bridge, B13, lies between the villages Vilvoorde and Melsbroek and crosses the highway E19 between Brussels and Antwerpen in Belgium. A drop weight and ambient vibration are used to excite the bridge and the response at selected points is recorded. A finite element model is constructed to support and verify the dynamic measurements. It is found that the difference between the natural frequencies measured using impact weight and ambient vibration is in general less than 1%.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2001.05a
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• pp.1065-1069
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• 2001

This study aims to suggest the basic data for structural safety assessment and design considering building dynamic characteristics. For this purpose, ambient vibration measurement was practiced after studying international standards dealing with vibration measurements such as ISO, DIN and so on. Various types of situation and condition which help search the building natural frequencies through the field measurements were proposed.

• Proceedings of the KSR Conference
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• 2008.06a
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• pp.93-100
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• 2008

Recently, due to the advanced measurement techniques, long-term health monitoring systems have been frequently applied to existing bridges. It is known that damping ratios as one of dynamic properties would be an important parameter for evaluating the bridge condition. However, damping ratios may be normally varied depending on the external loading effects on bridges. In general, both the logarithmic decrement and the half-power band width method as a conventional method can be simply used for evaluating the damping ratios accurately when bridge response signals are measured under free vibration conditions. In this study, the Hilbert-Huang transform and the extended Kalman filter were applied to evaluate the damping ratio by using the bridge acceleration signals measured under ambient vibration condition. From the results under ambient vibration condition of bridges, it was examined that the damping ratios evaluated from both the Hilbert-Huang transform and the extended Kalman filter could be more reliable than those from conventional methods.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.108-122
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• 2001

As bridge design is advancing toward the performance-based design. it becomes increasingly important to monitor and re-evaluate the long-term structural performance of bridges. Such information is essential in developing performance criteria for design. In this research. sensor systems for long-term structural performance monitoring have been installed on two highway bridges. Pre1iminary vibration measurement and data analysis have been performed on these instrumented bridges. On one bridge, ambient vibration data have been collected. based on which natural frequencies and mode shapes have been extracted using various methods and compared with those obtained by the preliminary finite element analysis. On the other bridge, braking and bumping vibration tests have been carried out using a water truck In addition to ambient vibration tests. Natural frequencies and mode shapes have been derived and the results by the breaking and bumping vibration tests have been compared. For the development of a three dimensional baseline finite element model, the new methodology using a neural network is proposed. The proposed one have been verified and applied to develop the baseline model of the bridge.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.83-90
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• 2010

In this study, it is conducted that the performance verification of the ambient load carrying capacity algorithm using long-term measurement systems of bridges. For this purpose, a steel-box type model bridge is fabricated and the public load carrying capacity of a steel-box model bridge is estimated by conducting the numerical analysis and load test. In addition, we compare the public load carrying capacity with the estimated result of a steel-box model bridge using the ambient load carrying capacity algorithm. By the assessment result, it is shown that the estimated ambient load carrying capacity is the difference of approximately 6.0 percentages as compared with the public load carrying capacity.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.50 no.2
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• pp.137-149
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• 2014

In this study, modal parameters such as natural frequencies, mode shapes and damping ratios of RC frames with low strength are determined for different construction stages using ambient vibration test. For this purpose full scaled, one bay and one story RC frames are produced and tested for plane, brick in-filled and brick in-filled with plaster conditions. Measurement time, frequency span and effective mode number are determined by considering similar studies and literature. To obtain experimental dynamic characteristics, Enhanced Frequency Domain Decomposition and Stochastic Subspace Identification techniques are used together. It is shown that the ambient vibration measurements are enough to identify the most significant modes of RC frames. The results indicate that modal parameters change significantly depending on the construction stages. In addition, Infill walls increase stiffness and change the mode shapes of the RC frame. There is a good agreement between mode shapes obtained from brick in-filled and in-filled with plaster conditions. However, some differences are seen in plane frame, like expected. Dynamic characteristics should be verified using finite element analysis. Finally, inconsistency between experimental and analytical dynamic characteristics should be minimize by finite element model updating using some uncertain parameters such as material properties, boundary condition and section properties to reflect the current behavior of the RC frames.

• Journal of Korean Association for Spatial Structures
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.77-84
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• 2018

The identification of damping ratios in buildings is a well-known problem and appears to be of important and crucial interest in the safety and serviceability design. When compared to an estimation of the stiffness, i.e. natural frequency, and mass, the damping ratio is the most difficult quantity to determine. Many previous studies have examined the characteristics of damping ratios from ambient vibration, but the measurement time is roughly within 2 hours. In this paper, characteristics of damping ratios and natural frequencies of 4 story RC building were investigated using long-term ambient vibration. Free vibrations were obtained using random decrement technique, and damping ratios were evaluated by the envelop function, continuous wavelet transform, and logarithmic decrement. It was found that although the natural frequencies show little variations with time, the damping ratios show some variations with time and the largest variations found in the damping ratios obtained from the continuous wavelet transform. The damping ratios from the envelop function showed the smallest mean and standard deviation. And the probability distribution of damping ratios seems to follow the logarithmic normal distribution.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.373-379
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• 2006

Vibration-based structural health monitoring is one of non-destructive evaluation (NDE) techniques for civil infrastructures. This paper presents a novel fiber optic accelerometer system to monitor civil engineering structures and a successful application of the novel sensor system for measuring ambient vibration of a real building structure. This sensor system integrates the Moire fringe phenomenon with fiber optics to achieve accurate and reliable measurements. The sensor system is immune to electromagnetic (EM) interference making it suitable for difficult applications in such environments involving strong EM fields, electrical spark-induced explosion risks, and cabling problems, prohibiting the use of conventional electromagnetic accelerometers. A prototype sensor system has been developed, together with a signal processing software. The experimental studies demonstrated the high-performance of the fiber optic sensor system. Especially, the sensor was successfully used for monitoring a real building on UCI (University of California Irvine, USA).

• Journal of Korean Association for Spatial Structures
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.47-54
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• 2016

It is very important to calculate natural frequency of the observatory tower correctly because it is keenly affected by wind response vibration due to its large slenderness ratio, weight and small damping ratio. Additionally, suggestion equation of natural frequency being used in the design phase has considerable difference between actual measured value thereby making it inappropriate to be used in the serviceability design of the observatory tower. Therefore, this paper conducted an ambient vibration measuring on 10 observatory towers through mobile-phone application thereby calculating the natural frequency and comparing the result with the domestic and foreign standards and that of the eigen-value analysis. This paper suggested approximate equation of the natural frequency of the observatory tower; T=0.0266H. The square of the corelation coefficient is 0.940, which is high.