• International Journal of Ocean System Engineering
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.200-208
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• 2012

Surge overflow may cause damage on earthen levees. Levee strengthened on the levee crest and landward-side slope can provide protection against the erosion damage induced by surge overflow. In this paper, surge overflow of a roller compacted concrete RCC strengthened levee was studied in a purely Lagrangian and meshless approach, the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method. After verifying the developed model with analytical solution and comparing the results with full-scale experimental data, the roughness and erosion parameters were calibrated. The water thickness, flow velocity, and erosion depth at crest, landward-side slope and toe were calculated. The characteristics of flow hydraulics and erosion on the RCC strengthened levee are given. The results indicate that the RCC strengthened levee can resist erosion damage for a long period.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.19 no.11
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• pp.167-173
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• 2002

The look up table method conventionally applied to control the inner temperature and humidity of a laver drying machine has repeatedly occurred not only laver's damage but also inferior goods since the reaching time at the optimum state takes a long time. In this paper, a fuzzy control theory instead of the look up table was proposed to reduce the reaching time at the optimum state. The proposed method used six input variables and four output variables for the fuzzy control, and a triangle rule for a fuzzifier, The Mandani's min-max method was applied to a fuzzy inference. Also, the mean method of maximum was applied to a defuzzifier. The method applied to the fuzzy controller contributed to reduce the reaching time at the optimum state, and to minimize not only laver's damage but also inferior goods.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.225-240
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• 1999

This paper presents a mechanistic approach to uniaxial viscoelastic constitutive modeling of asphalt concrete that accounts for damage evolution under cyclic loading conditions. An elasticviscoelastic correspondence principle in terms of pseudo variables is applied to separately evaluate viscoelasticity and time-dependent damage growth in asphalt concrete. The time-dependent damage growth in asphalt concrete is modeled by using a damage parameter based on a generalization of microcrack growth law. Internal state variables that describe the hysteretic behavior of asphalt concrete are determined. A constitutive equation in terms of stress and pseudo strain is first established for controlled-strain mode and then transformed to a controlled-stress constitutive equation by simply replacing physical stress and pseudo strain with pseudo stress and physical strain. Tensile uniaxial fatigue tests are performed under the controlled-strain mode to determine model parameters. The constitutive equations in terms of pseudo strain and pseudo stress satisfactorily predict the constitutive behavior of asphalt concrete all the way up to failure under controlled-strain and -stress modes, respectively.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.335-349
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• 2023

Bridges constantly undergo deterioration and damage, the most common ones being concrete damage and exposed rebar. Periodic inspection of bridges to identify damages can aid in their quick remediation. Likewise, identifying components can provide context for damage assessment and help gauge a bridge's state of interaction with its surroundings. Current inspection techniques rely on manual site visits, which can be time-consuming and costly. More recently, robotic inspection assisted by autonomous data analytics based on Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been viewed as a suitable alternative to manual inspection because of its efficiency and accuracy. To aid research in this avenue, this study performs a comparative assessment of different architectures, loss functions, and ensembling strategies for the autonomous segmentation of bridge components and damages. The experiments lead to several interesting discoveries. Nested Reg-UNet architecture is found to outperform five other state-of-the-art architectures in both damage and component segmentation tasks. The architecture is built by combining a Nested UNet style dense configuration with a pretrained RegNet encoder. In terms of the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) metric, the Nested Reg-UNet architecture provides an improvement of 2.86% on the damage segmentation task and 1.66% on the component segmentation task compared to the state-of-the-art UNet architecture. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that incorporating the Lovasz-Softmax loss function to counter class imbalance can boost performance by 3.44% in the component segmentation task over the most employed alternative, weighted Cross Entropy (wCE). Finally, weighted softmax ensembling is found to be quite effective when used synchronously with the Nested Reg-UNet architecture by providing mIoU improvement of 0.74% in the component segmentation task and 1.14% in the damage segmentation task over a single-architecture baseline. Overall, the best mIoU of 92.50% for the component segmentation task and 84.19% for the damage segmentation task validate the feasibility of these techniques for autonomous bridge component and damage segmentation using RGB images.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.201-217
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• 2007

An active damage detection technique is introduced to locate damage in an isotropic plate using Lamb waves. This technique uses a time-domain energy model of Lamb waves in plates that the wave amplitude inversely decays with the propagation distance along a ray direction. Accordingly the damage localization is formulated as a least-squares problem to minimize an error function between the model and the measured data. An active sensing system with integrated actuators/sensors is controlled to excite/receive $A_0$ mode of Lamb waves in the plate. Scattered wave signals from the damage can be obtained by subtracting the baseline signal of the undamaged plate from the recorded signal of the damaged plate. In the experimental study, after collecting the scattered wave signals, a discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is employed to extract the first scattered wave pack from the damage, then an iterative method is derived to solve the least-squares problem for locating the damage. Since this method does not rely on time-of-flight but wave energy measurement, it is more robust, reliable, and noise-tolerant. Both numerical and experimental examples are performed to verify the efficiency and accuracy of the method, and the results demonstrate that the estimated damage position stably converges to the targeted damage.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.841-859
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• 2016

Bridge bearings are important connection elements between bridge superstructures and substructures, whose health states directly affect the performance of the bridges. This paper systematacially presents a new method to identify the bridge bearing damage based on the neural network theory. Firstly, based on the analysis of different damage types, a description of the bearing damage is introduced, and a uniform description for all the damage types is given. Then, the feasibility and sensitivity of identifying the bearing damage with bridge vibration modes are investigated. After that, a Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBFNN) is built, whose input and output are the beam modal information and the damage information, respectively. Finally, trained by plenty of data samples formed by the numerical method, the network is employed to identify the bearing damage. Results show that the bridge bearing damage can be clearly reflected by the modal information of the bridge beam, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.111-130
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• 2014

The increased use of carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) in retrofitting reinforced concrete (RC) members has led to the need to develop non-destructive techniques that can monitor and characterize the unique damage mechanisms exhibited by such structural systems. This paper presented the damage characterization results of six CFRP retrofitted RC beam specimens tested in the laboratory and monitored using acoustic emission (AE). The focus of this study was to continuously monitor the change in AE parameters and analyze them both qualitatively and quantitatively, when brittle failure modes such as debonding occur in these beams. Although deterioration of structural integrity was traceable and can be quantified by monitoring the AE data, individual failure mode characteristics could not be identified due to the complexity of the system failure modes. In all, AE was an effective non-destructive monitoring tool that can trace the failure progression in RC beams retrofitted with CFRP. It would be advantageous to isolate signals originating from the CFRP and concrete, leading to a more clear understanding of the progression of the brittle damage mechanism involved in such a structural system. For practical applications, future studies should focus on spectral analysis of AE data from broadband sensors and automated pattern recognition tools to classify and better correlate AE parameters to failure modes observed.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.22 no.2
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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.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.6 no.6
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• pp.581-609
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• 2014

Reinforced concrete (RC) structures are likely to experience damage when subjected to earthquakes. Damage index (DI) has been recognised as an advanced tool of quantitatively expressing the extent of damage in such structures. Last 30 years have seen many concepts for DI proposed in order to calibrate the observed levels of damage. The current research briefly reviews all available concepts and investigates their relative merits and limitations with a view to proposing a new concept based on residual deformation. Currently available DIs are classified into two broad categories - non-cumulative DI and cumulative DI. Non-cumulative DIs do not include the effects of cyclic loading, whilst the cumulative concepts produce more rational indication of the level of damage in case of earthquake excitations. Ideally, a DI should vary within a scale of 0 to 1 with 0 representing the state of elastic response, and 1 referring to the state of total collapse. Some of the available DIs do not satisfy these criteria. A new DI based on energy is proposed herein and its performances, both for static and for cyclic loadings, are compared with those obtained using the most widely accepted DI in literature. The proposed DI demonstrates a rational way to predict the extent of damage for a number of case studies. More research is encouraged to address some identified issues.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.63 no.6
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• pp.789-797
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• 2017

Recently, some integrated structural identification/damage detection and reliability evaluation of structures with uncertainties have been proposed. However, these techniques are applicable for off-line synthesis of structural identification and reliability evaluation. In this paper, based on the recursive formulation of the extended Kalman filter, an on-line integration of structural identification/damage detection and reliability evaluation of stochastic building structures is investigated. Structural limit state is expanded by the Taylor series in terms of uncertain variables to obtain the probability density function (PDF). Both structural component reliability with only one limit state function and system reliability with multi-limit state functions are studied. Then, it is extended to adopt the recent extended Kalman filter with unknown input (EKF-UI) proposed by the authors for on-line integration of structural identification/damage detection and structural reliability evaluation of stochastic building structures subject to unknown excitations. Numerical examples are used to demonstrate the proposed method. The evaluated results of structural component reliability and structural system reliability are compared with those by the Monte Carlo simulation to validate the performances of the proposed method.