• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.15-29
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• 2019

This paper addresses the problem of damage detection in suspension bridge hangers, with an emphasis on the modal flexibility method. It aims at evaluating the capability and the accuracy of the modal flexibility method to detect and locate single and multiple damages in suspension bridge hangers, with different level of severity and various locations. The study is conducted numerically and experimentally on a laboratory suspension bridge mock-up. First, the covariance-driven stochastic subspace identification is used to extract the modal parameters of the bridge from experimental data, using only output measurements data from ambient vibration. Then, the method is demonstrated for several damage scenarios and compared against other classical methods, such as: Coordinate Modal Assurance Criterion (COMAC), Enhanced Coordinate Modal Assurance Criterion (ECOMAC), Mode Shape Curvature (MSC) and Modal Strain Energy (MSE). The paper demonstrates the relative merits and shortcomings of these methods which play a significant role in the damage detection ofsuspension bridges.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.1-15
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• 1997

This paper presents substructural identification methods for the assessment of local damages in complex and large structural systems. For this purpose, an auto-regressive and moving average with stochastic input (ARMAX) model is derived for a substructure to process the measurement data impaired by noises. Using the substructural methods, the number of unknown parameters for each identification can be significantly reduced, hence the convergence and accuracy of estimation can be improved. Secondly, the damage index is defined as the ratio of the current stiffness to the baseline value at each element for the damage assessment. The indirect estimation method was performed using the estimated results from the identification of the system matrices from the substructural identification. To demonstrate the proposed techniques, several simulation and experimental example analyses are carried out for structural models of a 2-span truss structure, a 3-span continuous beam model and 3-story building model. The results indicate that the present substructural identification method and damage estimation methods are effective and efficient for local damage estimation of complex structures.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.87-102
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• 2013

Vibration-based damage detection methods are popular for structural health monitoring. However, they can only detect fairly large damages. Usually impact pulse, ambient vibrations and sine-wave forces are applied as the excitations. In this paper, we propose the method to use the chaotic excitation to vibrate structures. The attractors built from the output responses are used for the minor damage detection. After the damage is detected, it is further quantified using the Kalman Filter. Simulations are conducted. A 5-story building is subjected to chaotic excitation. The structural responses and related attractors are analyzed. The results show that the attractor distances increase monotonously with the increase of the damage degree. Therefore, damages, including minor damages, can be effectively detected using the proposed approach. With the Kalman Filter, damage which has the stiffness decrease of about 5% or lower can be quantified. The proposed approach will be helpful for detecting and evaluating minor damages at the early stage.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.291-302
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• 2018

This paper presents a flexibility based method for damage identification from static measurements in beam-type structures. The response of the beam at the Damaged State is decomposed into the response at the Reference State plus the response at an Incremental State, which represents the effect of damage. The damage is localized by detecting slope discontinuities in the deflection of the structure at the Incremental State. A denoising filtering technique is applied to reduce the effect of experimental noise. The extent of the damage is estimated through comparing the experimental flexural stiffness of the damaged cross-sections with the corresponding values provided by analytical models of cracked beams. The paper illustrates the method by showing a numerical example with two cracks and an experimental case study of a simply supported steel beam with one artificially introduced notch type crack at three damage levels. A Digital Image Correlation system was used to accurately measure the deflections of the beam at a dense measurement grid under a set of point loads. The results indicate that the method can successfully detect and quantify a small damage from the experimental data.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.163-179
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• 2016

The Cuckoo search (CS) algorithm is a simple and efficient global optimization algorithm and it has been applied to figure out large range of real-world optimization problem. In this paper, a new formula is introduced to the discovering probability process to improve the convergence rate and the Tournament Selection Strategy is adopted to enhance global search ability of the certain algorithm. Then an approach for structural damage identification based on modified Cuckoo search (MCS) is presented. Meanwhile, we take frequency residual error and the modal assurance criterion (MAC) as indexes of damage detection in view of the crack damage, and the MCS algorithm is utilized to identifying the structural damage. A simply supported beam and a 31-bar truss are studied as numerical example to illustrate the correctness and efficiency of the propose method. Besides, a laboratory work is also conducted to further verification. Studies show that, the proposed method can judge the damage location and degree of structures more accurately than its counterpart even under measurement noise, which demonstrates the MCS algorithm has a higher damage diagnosis precision.

• Journal of Korean Society of Steel Construction
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• v.15 no.6 s.67
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• pp.603-610
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• 2003

A damage identification technique using static displacement data is developed to asses s the structural integrity of bridge structures.As such, the relationship between static displacement and stiffness is derived, and the optimization technique utilized.Comparisons with numerical and experimental tests are performed to investigate the practical applicability of the proposed method.Various damage scenarios are considered by varying damage-width as well as damage-degree. The influence of noise in identifying the damage is also numerically investigated.Finally, the applicability and limitation of the proposed method are discussed.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.101-111
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• 2023

Structural health monitoring (SHM) covers a range of damage detection strategies for buildings. In real-time, SHM provides a basis for rapid decision making to optimise the speed and economic efficiency of post-event response. Previous work introduced an SHM method based on identifying structural nonlinear hysteretic parameters and their evolution from structural force-deformation hysteresis loops in real-time. This research extends and generalises this method to investigate the impact of a wide range of flag-shaped or pinching shape nonlinear hysteretic response and its impact on the SHM accuracy. A particular focus is plastic stiffness (K_p), where accurate identification of this parameter enables accurate identification of net and total plastic deformation and plastic energy dissipated, all of which are directly related to damage and infrequently assessed in SHM. A sensitivity study using a realistic seismic case study with known ground truth values investigates the impact of hysteresis loop shape, as well as added noise, on SHM accuracy using a suite of 20 ground motions from the PEER database. Monte Carlo analysis over 22,000 simulations with different hysteresis loops and added noise resulted in absolute percentage identification error (median, (IQR)) in K_p of 1.88% (0.79, 4.94)%. Errors were larger where five events (Earthquakes #1, 6, 9, 14) have very large errors over 100% for resulted K_p as an almost entirely linear response yielded only negligible plastic response, increasing identification error. The sensitivity analysis shows accuracy is reduces to within 3% when plastic drift is induced. This method shows clear potential to provide accurate, real-time metrics of non-linear stiffness and deformation to assist rapid damage assessment and decision making, utilising algorithms significantly simpler than previous non-linear structural model-based parameter identification SHM methods.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.62 no.6
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• pp.709-717
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• 2017

This paper develops a two-stage method for structural damage identification by using modal data. First, the Residual Force Vector (RFV) is introduced to detect any potentially damaged elements of structures. Second, data of the frequency domain are used to build up the objective function, and then the Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) is utilized to estimate damaged extents. ICA is a heuristic algorithm with simple structure, which is easy to be implemented and it is effective to deal with high-dimension nonlinear optimization problem. The advantages of this present method are: (1) Calculation complexity can be decreased greatly after eliminating many intact elements in the first step. (2) Robustness, ICA ensures the robustness of the proposed method. Various damaged cases and different structures are investigated in numerical simulations. From these results, anyone can point out that the present algorithm is effective and robust for structural damage identification and is also better than many other heuristic algorithms.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.57-68
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• 2023

Bridge hangers, such as those in suspension and cable-stayed bridges, suffer from cumulative fatigue damage caused by dynamic loads (e.g., cyclic traffic and wind loads) in their service condition. Thus, the identification of damage to hangers is important in preserving the service life of the bridge structure. This study develops a new method for condition assessment of bridge hangers. The tension force of the bridge and the damages in the element level can be identified using the Bayesian optimization method. To improve the number of observed data, the additional mass method is combined the Bayesian optimization method. Numerical studies are presented to verify the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method. The influence of different acquisition functions, which include expected improvement (EI), probability-of-improvement (PI), lower confidence bound (LCB), and expected improvement per second (EIPC), on the identification of damage to the bridge hanger is studied. Results show that the errors identified by the EI acquisition function are smaller than those identified by the other acquisition functions. The identification of the damage to the bridge hanger with various types of boundary conditions and different levels of measurement noise are also studied. Results show that both the severity of the damage and the tension force can be identified via the proposed method, thereby verifying the robustness of the proposed method. Compared to the genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and nonlinear least-square method (NLS), the Bayesian optimization (BO) performs best in identifying the structural damage and tension force.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.153-166
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• 2023

Health monitoring of civil infrastructures, in particular, old bridges that are still in service, has become more than necessary, given the risk that a possible degradation or failure of these infrastructures can induce on the safety of users in addition to the resulting commercial and economic impact. Bridge integrity assessment has attracted significant research efforts over the past forty years with the aim of developing new damage identification methods applicable to real structures. The bridge of Ouled Mimoun (Tlemcen, Algeria) is one of the oldest railway structure in the country. It was built in 1889. This bridge, which is too low with respect to the level of the road, has suffered multiple shocks from various machines that caused considerable damage to its central part. The present work aims to analyze the stability of this bridge by identifying damages and evaluating the damage rate in different parts of the structure on the basis of a finite element model. The applied method is based on an inverse analysis of the normal stress responses that were calculated from the corresponding recorded strains, during the passage of a real train, by means of a set of strain gauges placed on certain elements of the bridge. The results obtained from the inverse analysis made it possible to successfully locate areas that were really damaged and to estimate the damage rate. These results were also used to detect an excessive rigidity in certain elements due to the presence of plates, which were neglected in the numerical reference model. In the case of the continuous bridge monitoring, this developed method will be a very powerful tool as a smart health monitoring system, allowing engineers to take in time decisions in the event of bridge damage.