• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.6 no.3
• /
• pp.263-275
• /
• 2010

In the last decade, wireless sensor networks have emerged as a promising technology that could accelerate progress in the field of structural monitoring. The main advantages of wireless sensor networks compared to conventional monitoring technologies are fast deployment, small interference with the surroundings, self-organization, flexibility and scalability. These features could enable mass application of monitoring systems, even on smaller structures. However, since wireless sensor network nodes are battery powered and data communication is the most energy consuming task, transferring all the acquired raw data through the network would dramatically limit system lifetime. Hence, data reduction has to be achieved at the node level in order to meet the system lifetime requirements of real life applications. The objective of this paper is to discuss some general aspects of data processing and management in monitoring systems based on wireless sensor networks, to present a prototype monitoring system for civil engineering structures, and to illustrate long-term field test results.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
• /
• v.1 no.3
• /
• pp.249-271
• /
• 2014

This paper presents a unique study of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) for the maintenance decision making about a real life movable bridge. The mechanical components of movable bridges are maintained on a scheduled basis. However, it is desired to have a condition-based maintenance by taking advantage of SHM. The main objective is to track the operation of a gearbox and a rack-pinion/open gear assembly, which are critical parts of bascule type movable bridges. Maintenance needs that may lead to major damage to these components needs to be identified and diagnosed timely since an early detection of faults may help avoid unexpected bridge closures or costly repairs. The fault prediction of the gearbox and rack-pinion/open gear is carried out using two types of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs): 1) Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Networks (MLP-NNs) and 2) Fuzzy Neural Networks (FNNs). Monitoring data is collected during regular opening and closing of the bridge as well as during artificially induced reversible damage conditions. Several statistical parameters are extracted from the time-domain vibration signals as characteristic features to be fed to the ANNs for constructing the MLP-NNs and FNNs independently. The required training and testing sets are obtained by processing the acceleration data for both damaged and undamaged condition of the aforementioned mechanical components. The performances of the developed ANNs are first evaluated using unseen test sets. Second, the selected networks are used for long-term condition evaluation of the rack-pinion/open gear of the movable bridge. It is shown that the vibration monitoring data with selected statistical parameters and particular network architectures give successful results to predict the undamaged and damaged condition of the bridge. It is also observed that the MLP-NNs performed better than the FNNs in the presented case. The successful results indicate that ANNs are promising tools for maintenance monitoring of movable bridge components and it is also shown that the ANN results can be employed in simple approach for day-to-day operation and maintenance of movable bridges.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
• /
• v.7 no.1
• /
• pp.43-58
• /
• 2020

Pile foundations of existing bridges lie in soil and water environment for long term and endure relatively heavy vertical loads, thus prone to damages, especially after stricken by external forces, such as earthquake, collision, soil heap load and etc., and the piles may be injured to certain degrees as well. There is a relatively complete technical system for quality inspection of new bridge pile foundations without structures on the top. However, there is no mature technical standard in the engineering community for the non-destructive testing technology specific to the existing bridge pile foundations. The quality of bridge pile foundations has always been a major problem that plagues bridge maintenance. On the basis of many years' experiences in test engineering and theoretical studies, this study developed a new type of detection technology and equipment for the existing bridge piles.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.21 no.5
• /
• pp.591-600
• /
• 2018

The probabilistic characterization of wind field characteristics is a significant task for fatigue reliability assessment of long-span railway bridges in wind-prone regions. In consideration of the effect of wind direction, the stochastic properties of wind field should be represented by a bivariate statistical model of wind speed and direction. This paper presents the construction of the bivariate model of wind speed and direction at the site of a railway arch bridge by use of the long-term structural health monitoring (SHM) data. The wind characteristics are derived by analyzing the real-time wind monitoring data, such as the mean wind speed and direction, turbulence intensity, turbulence integral scale, and power spectral density. A sequential quadratic programming (SQP) algorithm-based finite mixture modeling method is proposed to formulate the joint distribution model of wind speed and direction. For the probability density function (PDF) of wind speed, a double-parameter Weibull distribution function is utilized, and a von Mises distribution function is applied to represent the PDF of wind direction. The SQP algorithm with multi-start points is used to estimate the parameters in the bivariate model, namely Weibull-von Mises mixture model. One-year wind monitoring data are selected to validate the effectiveness of the proposed modeling method. The optimal model is jointly evaluated by the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) and coefficient of determination, $R^2$. The obtained results indicate that the proposed SQP algorithm-based finite mixture modeling method can effectively establish the bivariate model of wind speed and direction. The established bivariate model of wind speed and direction will facilitate the wind-induced fatigue reliability assessment of long-span bridges.

• Proceedings of the KSR Conference
• /
• 2003.10b
• /
• pp.483-488
• /
• 2003

Calibration and gauge factor readjustment process made for the health monitoring system installed in the railway bridges is reviewed and some findings are explained in this study: specifically, the calibrators made for this purpose are illustrated and the regression processes of the calibration on long-term displacement using water level sensor, longitudinal displacement using LVDT sensor, instantaneous displacement using LVDT sensors and accelerometer are described in details. Based on the regression results, new gauge factors are obtained from regression equation and another verification is made by performing another calibration again with new factors. From the second calibration, it was found that the suggested regression curves and their factors are appropriate and much better results are expected. Future work will be concentrated on the long-term analysis of the measurement data and on the database structures so that the assessment of the structure such as damage detection and remaining life estimation is possible.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
• /
• v.41 no.1
• /
• pp.139-155
• /
• 2012

Structural health monitoring systems are often installed on bridges to provide assessments of the need for structural maintenance and repair. Damage or deterioration may be detected by observation of changes in bridge characteristics evaluated from measured structural responses. However, construction materials such as concrete and steel cables exhibit certain time-dependent behaviour, which also results in changes in structural characteristics. If these are not accounted for properly, false alarms may arise. This paper proposes a systematic and efficient method to study the time-dependent effects on the dynamic properties of cable-stayed bridges. After establishing the finite element model of a cable-stayed bridge taking into account geometric nonlinearities and time-dependent behaviour, long-term time-dependent analysis is carried out by time integration. Then the dynamic properties of the bridge after a certain period can be obtained. The effects of time-dependent behaviour of construction materials on the dynamic properties of typical cable-stayed bridges are investigated in detail.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
• /
• v.34 no.5
• /
• pp.301-308
• /
• 2021

It is important to develop a digital SOC (Social Overhead Capital) maintenance system for preemptive maintenance in response to the rapid aging of social infrastructures. Abnormal signals induced from structures can be detected quickly and optimal decisions can be made promptly using IoT sensors deployed on the structures. In this study, a digital SOC monitoring system incorporating a multimetric IoT sensor was developed for long-term monitoring, for use in cloud-computing server for automated and powerful data analysis, and for establishing databases to perform : (1) multimetric sensing, (2) long-term operation, and (3) LTE-based direct communication. The developed sensor had three axes of acceleration, and five axes of strain sensing channels for multimetric sensing, and had an event-driven power management system that activated the sensors only when vibration exceeded a predetermined limit, or the timer was triggered. The power management system could reduce power consumption, and an additional solar panel charging could enable long-term operation. Data from the sensors were transmitted to the server in real-time via low-power LTE-CAT M1 communication, which does not require an additional gateway device. Furthermore, the cloud server was developed to receive multi-variable data from the sensor, and perform a displacement fusion algorithm to obtain reference-free structural displacement for ambient structural assessment. The proposed digital SOC system was experimentally validated on a steel railroad and concrete girder bridge.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
• /
• v.3 no.4
• /
• pp.315-333
• /
• 2016

This study aims to perform damage identification for Da-Sheng-Guan (DSG) high-speed railway truss arch bridge using fuzzy clustering analysis. Firstly, structural health monitoring (SHM) system is established for the DSG Bridge. Long-term field monitoring strain data in 8 different cases caused by high-speed trains are taken as classification reference for other unknown cases. And finite element model (FEM) of DSG Bridge is established to simulate damage cases of the bridge. Then, effectiveness of one fuzzy clustering analysis method named transitive closure method and FEM results are verified using the monitoring strain data. Three standardization methods at the first step of fuzzy clustering transitive closure method are compared: extreme difference method, maximum method and non-standard method. At last, the fuzzy clustering method is taken to identify damage with different degrees and different locations. The results show that: non-standard method is the best for the data with the same dimension at the first step of fuzzy clustering analysis. Clustering result is the best when 8 carriage and 16 carriage train in the same line are in a category. For DSG Bridge, the damage is identified when the strain mode change caused by damage is more significant than it caused by different carriages. The corresponding critical damage degree called damage threshold varies with damage location and reduces with the increase of damage locations.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.16 no.2
• /
• pp.221-230
• /
• 2016

As structures' long term performances and users' safety have been highlighted, a new maintenance technique using IT has drawn attention around the globe. Therefore, throughout the paper, by analyzing bridge's static and dynamic data using wireless measuring sensor, a "real time smart bridge monitoring system" has developed. Smart bridge monitoring system is consists of three main parts a sensor that can measure major members' movement, a wireless system that informs the data from the sensor, and the database system that analysis the data. In order to test the performance of the system, five different were placed on the Olympic Bridge, Seoul. The power system of the sensors was replaced by self-sustain solar energy system. In order to validate data from the real time smart bridge monitoring system, the data was collected for a week from both wireless system and the wired system and the two data were compared to see the relevance.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.29 no.1
• /
• pp.167-179
• /
• 2022

This article develops a long-term condition assessment method for stay cables in cable stayed bridges using the monitored cable tension forces under operational condition. Based on the concept of influence surface, the matched cable tension ratio of two cables located at the same side (either in the upstream side or downstream side) is theoretically proven to be related to the condition of stay cables and independent of the positions of vehicles on the bridge. A sensor grouping scheme is designed to ensure that reliable damage detection result can be obtained even when sensor fault occurs in the neighbor of the damaged cable. Cable forces measured from an in-service cable-stayed bridge in China are used to demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method. Damage detection results show that the proposed approach is sensitive to the rupture of wire damage in a specific cable and is robust to environmental effects, measurement noise, sensor fault and different traffic patterns. Using the damage sensitive feature in the proposed approach, the metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall and F1 score, which are used to evaluate the performance of damage detection, are 97.97%, 95.08%, 100% and 97.48%, respectively. These results indicate that the proposed approach can reliably detect the damage in stay cables. In addition, the proposed approach is efficient and promising with applications to the field monitoring of cables in cable-stayed bridges.