• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.293-301
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• 2019

Bolted joints are commonly used in civil infrastructure and mechanical assembly structures. Monitoring and identifying the connection status of bolts is the frontier problem of structural research. The existing research is mainly on the looseness of a single bolt. This article presents a study of assessing the loosening/tightening health state and identifying the loose bolt by using ultrasonic guided wave in a bolt group joint. A bolt-tightening index was proposed for evaluating the looseness of a bolt connection based on correlation coefficient. The tightening/loosening state of the bolt was simulated by changing the bolt torque. More than 180 different measurement tests for total of six bolts were conducted. The results showed that with the bolt torque increases, value of the proposed bolt-tightening index increases. The proposed bolt-tightening index trend was very well reproduced by an analytical expression using a function of the torque applied with an overall percentage error lower than 5%. The developed damage index based on the proposed bolt-tightening index can also be applied to locate the loosest bolt in a bolt group joint. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, a bolt group joint experiment with different positions of bolt looseness was performed. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is effective to detect and locate bolt looseness and has a good prospect of finding applications in real-time structural monitoring.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.423-432
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• 2020

In this paper, a novel but practical approach named series/parallel multi-sensing technique was proposed to evaluate the bolt looseness in a bolt group. The smart washers (SWs), which were fabricated by embedding a Lead Zirconate Titanate (PZT) transducer into two flat metal rings, were installed to the bolts group. By series connection of SWs, the impedance signals of different bolts can be obtained through only one sweep. Therefore, once the loosening occurred, the shift of different peak frequencies can be used to locate which bolt has loosened. The proposed multi input single output (MISO) damage detection scheme is very suitable for the structural health monitoring (SHM) of joint with a large number of bolts connection. Another notable contribution of this paper is the proposal of 3-dB bandwidth root mean square deviation (3 dB-RMSD) which can quantitatively evaluate the severity of bolt looseness. Compared with the traditional naked-eye observation method, the equivalent circuit based 3-dB bandwidth can accurately define the calculation range of RMSD. An experiment with three bolted connection specimens that installed the SWs was carried out to validate our proposed approach. Experimental result shows that the proposed 3 dB-RMSD based multi-sensing technique can not only identify the loosened bolt but also monitor the severity of bolt looseness.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.397-410
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• 2022

It is essential to monitor the working conditions of bolt-connected joints, which are widely used in various kinds of steel structures. The looseness of bolts may directly affect the stability and safety of the entire structure. In this study, a guided wave-based method for bolt looseness detection and localization is presented for a joint structure with multiple bolts. SH waves generated and received by a small number (two pairs) of magnetostrictive transducers were used. The bolt looseness index was proposed based on the changes in the reconstructed responses excited by the time reversal signals of the measured unit impulse responses. The damage locations and local damage severities were estimated using the damage indices from several wave propagation paths. The back propagation neural network (BPNN) technique was employed to identify the local damages. Numerical and experimental studies were conducted on a lap joint with eight bolts. The results show that the total damage severity can be successfully detected under the effect of external force and measurement noise. The local damage severity can be estimated reasonably for the experimental data using the BPNN constructed by the training patterns generated from the finite element simulations.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.24 no.9
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• pp.44-51
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• 2007

There are many methods to assemble various parts of a product, and one of them is the bolting system widely used in a industrial field due to the merits; easiness to obtain strong tightening force, simplicity of assemble or disassemble in order to repair, substitution or cleaning, and so on. But this bolting system needs attachments not to let a bolt loose and they are an important factor to cost a great deal. In this study, some equations are suggested and FE analyses are carried out to verify the cause of the bolt looseness occurring in the tightening process. And because the number of bolts in the bolting system has been decided by empirical know-how of designers in the field, safety rate in the plate type heat exchanger is often too high. Therefore the equations to decrease in quantity are suggested in consideration of the relationship between a critical shearing force acting on the screw and a normal force acting on the cooling plate by the working fluid.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.20 no.7
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• pp.387-392
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• 2019

A technique was researched to detect bolt looseness using a transfer impedance technique (the dual piezoelectric material technique) for monitoring the structural health of a bolt joint. In order to use the single piezoelectric material technique, an expensive impedance analyzer should be used. However, in the transfer impedance technique, low-cost fault detection can be performed using a general function generator and a digital multimeter. A steel plate frame test specimen composed of bolt joints was fabricated, and the tightening torques of the bolts were loosened step by step. By using the transfer impedance method, the damage index was obtained. It was found that the presence of faults could be reasonably estimated using the damage index, which increased with the degree of bolt looseness. An experiment was performed on the same specimen using the single piezoelectric material technique, and the results showed a similar tendency. It could be possible to estimate the damage of a bolt joint at low cost by eliminating the expensive impedance analyzer. This method could be used effectively for structural health monitoring after carrying out a study to estimate the fault location and severity.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2002.10a
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• pp.86.6-86
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• 2002

This work presents a study on development of a practical and quantitative technique for assessment of the healthy state of a structure by piezoelectric impedance-based technique associated with longitudinal wave propagation measuring method. A truss structure embedded with piezoelectric patches is investigated for a fundamental study on estimation of the looseness of bolts in the joint. In order to evaluate the minute mechanical impedance change due to loosening bolt, a harmonic longitudinal elastic wave is applied to the structure by a pair of PZT patches and their electric impedance is measured simultaneously. According to the experimental results, the change of the electric impedance of P...

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2005.06a
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• pp.1363-1366
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• 2005

The tiebar is used by joint for keeping from deformation by conserving tensile load between two structure. The tiebar, bolt joining type, is combined by tiebar and clevis like bolt and nut. By coupled, it maintains tensile load. While it goes through repeated load, it occurs to loose because joining force between clevis and nuts is reduced. So, continuos maintenance is needed such as making tighter periodically, repairing the broken part and so on. For that reason, this paper calculates necessary torque unfastening joint for conventional tiebar and presenting tiebar theoretically and then consider the reason that conventional bolt-typed tiebar unties. Also, through vibration untied test for two types of tiebar we confirm that presenting tiebar have a improvement of unfastening when we compare with the conventional one.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.513-520
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• 2022

During the long-time service of a bolt, its preload may suffer slight perturbations or significant reductions. It is a dilemma to monitor preload changes at high resolution and full scale. Approaches for bolt preload monitoring with multi-resolution should be developed. In this paper, a simple and effective multi-resolution bolt preload monitoring approach using ultrasonic guided waves (UGW) is proposed. A linear relationship between the time-of-flight (TOF) variation of multi-reflected waves and preload is derived to theoretically reveal the multi-resolution properties of UGW. The variations of TOF before and after the slight preload perturbations are extracted by using a global evaluation method. Experimental results show that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd-reflected UGWs is larger than 20 dB. The resolution of the 2^nd-reflected UGW is higher than that of the 1^st-reflected UGW and lower than that of the 3^rd-reflected UGW. The ultimate detectable resolutions of bolt preload (DRBP) of the 1^st and 3^th-reflected UGWs are 0.9% and 0.5%, respectively. By using the 1^st and 3^th-reflected guided waves, the bolt looseness with different degrees can be monitored simultaneously.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.23-35
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• 2023

Steel bolted joint is an important part of steel structure, and its damage directly affects the bearing capacity and durability of steel structure. Currently, the existing research mainly focuses on the identification of corroded bolts and corroded bolts respectively, and there are few studies on multiple states. A detection framework of corroded and loosened bolts is proposed in this study, and the innovations can be summarized as follows: (i) Vision Transformer (ViT) is introduced to replace the third and fourth C3 module of you-only-look-once version 5s (YOLOv5s) algorithm, which increases the attention weights of feature channels and the feature extraction capability. (ii) Three states of the steel bolts are considered, including corroded bolt, bolt missing and clean bolt. (iii) Line segment detector (LSD) is introduced for bolt rotation angle calculation, which realizes bolt looseness detection. The improved YOLOv5s model was validated on the dataset, and the mean average precision (mAP) was increased from 0.902 to 0.952. In terms of a lab-scale joint, the performance of the LSD algorithm and the Hough transform was compared from different perspective angles. The error value of bolt loosening angle of the LSD algorithm is controlled within 1.09%, less than 8.91% of the Hough transform. Furthermore, the proposed framework was applied to fullscale joints of a steel bridge in China. Synthetic images of loosened bolts were successfully identified and the multiple states were well detected. Therefore, the proposed framework can be alternative of monitoring steel bolted joints for management department.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.860-863
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• 2005

This work presents a study on development of a practical and quantitative technique for assessment of the structural health condition by PZT impedance-based technique associated with longitudinal wave propagation. The bolt fastening condition is adjusted by torque wrench In order to estimate the damage condition numerically, we suggest the evaluation method of impedance peak frequency shift $\Delta$F in this paper.