• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.309-333
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• 2010

Civil infrastructure, in both its construction and maintenance, represents the largest societal investment in this country, outside of the health care industry. Despite being the lifeline of US commerce, civil infrastructure has scarcely benefited from the latest sensor technological advances. Our future should focus on harnessing these technologies to enhance the robustness, longevity and economic viability of this vast, societal investment, in light of inherent uncertainties and their exposure to service and even extreme loadings. One of the principal means of insuring the robustness and longevity of infrastructure is to strategically deploy smart sensors in them. Therefore, the objective is to develop novel, durable, smart sensors that are especially applicable to major infrastructure and the facilities to validate their reliability and long-term functionality. In some cases, this implies the development of new sensing elements themselves, while in other cases involves innovative packaging and use of existing sensor technologies. In either case, a parallel focus will be the integration and networking of these smart sensing elements for reliable data acquisition, transmission, and fusion, within a decision-making framework targeting efficient management and maintenance of infrastructure systems. In this paper, prudent and viable sensor and health monitoring technologies have been developed and used in several large structural systems. Discussion will also include several practical bridge health monitoring applications including their design, construction, and operation of the systems.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.317-328
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• 2009

Current maintenance operations and integrity checks on a wide array of structures require personnel entry into normally-inaccessible or hazardous areas to perform necessary nondestructive inspections. To gain access for these inspections, structure must be disassembled and removed or personnel must be transported to remote locations. The use of in-situ sensors, coupled with remote interrogation, can be employed to overcome a myriad of inspection impediments stemming from accessibility limitations, complex geometries, the location and depth of hidden damage, and the isolated location of the structure. Furthermore, prevention of unexpected flaw growth and structural failure could be improved if on-board health monitoring systems were used to more regularly assess structural integrity. A research program has been completed to develop and validate Comparative Vacuum Monitoring (CVM) Sensors for surface crack detection. Statistical methods using one-sided tolerance intervals were employed to derive Probability of Detection (POD) levels for a wide array of application scenarios. Multi-year field tests were also conducted to study the deployment and long-term operation of CVM sensors on aircraft. This paper presents the quantitative crack detection capabilities of the CVM sensor, its performance in actual flight environments, and the prospects for structural health monitoring applications on aircraft and other civil structures.

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

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.163-173
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• 2017

Structural health monitoring (SHM) of civil infrastructure using fiber Bragg grating sensor networks (FBGSNs) has received significant public attention in recent years. However, there is currently little research on the health-monitoring technology of high-piled wharfs in coastal ports using the fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor technique. The benefits of FBG sensors are their small size, light weight, lack of conductivity, resistance corrosion, multiplexing ability and immunity to electromagnetic interference. Based on the properties of high-piled wharfs in coastal ports and servicing seawater environment and the benefits of FBG sensors, the SHM system for a high-piled wharf in the Tianjin Port of China is devised and deployed partly using the FBG sensor technique. In addition, the health-monitoring parameters are proposed. The system can monitor the structural mechanical properties and durability, which provides a state-of-the-art mean to monitor the health conditions of the wharf and display the monitored data with the BIM technique. In total, 289 FBG stain sensors, 87 FBG temperature sensors, 20 FBG obliquity sensors, 16 FBG pressure sensors, 8 FBG acceleration sensors and 4 anode ladders are installed in the components of the back platform and front platform. After the installation of some components in the wharf construction site, the good signal that each sensor measures demonstrates the suitability of the sensor setup methods, and it is proper for the full-scale, continuous, autonomous SHM deployment for the high-piled wharf in the costal port. The South 27# Wharf SHM system constitutes the largest deployment of FBG sensors for wharf structures in costal ports to date. This deployment demonstrates the strong potential of FBGSNs to monitor the health of large-scale coastal wharf structures. This study can provide a reference to the long-term health-monitoring system deployment for high-piled wharf structures in coastal ports.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.10 no.6 s.52
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• pp.9-18
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• 2006

This paper presents schematically the monitoring system installed in Yongjong Bridge, a self-anchored suspension bridge located in the expressway linking Seoul and Incheon International Airport. Automatic measurement of instrumented civil engineering structures is now widely applied for behavior monitoring during construction in field as well as long-term monitoring for lifetime assessment of bridge structures. A representative example of results that can be acquired through structural health monitoring system is presented by means of data measured during a few years after the opening of the bridge. In order to effectively measure the tension force for hangers that have relatively short length or high tension force, a static tension measurement device has been explored. Newly equipped railway system on the existing bridge results in change of dead load, consequently dynamic characteristics have also been changed. This result can be detected by the monitoring system during and after railway construction.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.109-124
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• 2020

Benefiting from the massive monitoring data collected by the Structural health monitoring (SHM) system, scholars can grasp the complex environmental effects and structural state during structure operation. However, the monitoring data is often missing due to sensor faults and other reasons. It is necessary to study the recovery method of missing monitoring data. Taking the structural temperature monitoring data of Nanjing Dashengguan Yangtze River Bridge as an example, the long short-term memory (LSTM) network-based recovery method for missing structural temperature data is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the prediction results of temperature data using LSTM network, support vector machine (SVM), and wavelet neural network (WNN) are compared to verify the accuracy advantage of LSTM network in predicting time series data (such as structural temperature). Secondly, the application of LSTM network in the recovery of missing structural temperature data is discussed in detail. The results show that: the LSTM network can effectively recover the missing structural temperature data; incorporating more intact sensor data as input will further improve the recovery effect of missing data; selecting the sensor data which has a higher correlation coefficient with the data we want to recover as the input can achieve higher accuracy.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers P
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• v.65 no.1
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• pp.7-12
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• 2016

With due to the recent development of USN (Ubiquitous Sensor Network) technology, a monitoring system has been developing for assuring the structural integrity of infrastructure through normal or long term measurements during their lifetime. An accident such as a collapse of infrastructure may cause not only loss of life but also damage to the economy of the nation. In order to enhance the availability of infrastructure and to be able to maintain their lifetime, it is necessary to monitor and to evaluate continuously the structural integrity throughout their entire lifetime. The purpose of this paper is to develop a monitoring system integrated with evaluation function based on the ubiquitous technology. The most essential part of this study is focusing more on developing a specific module convertible to A/D, which is to enhance the applicability of sensors that had not been applied to existing monitoring systems. Conclusively it has been successfully enhanced to make more diverse the number of sensors and measuring techniques for the monitoring system.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.591-600
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• 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
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• 2011.05a
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• pp.1735-1741
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• 2011

The safety of station structures among railway infrastructures should be considered as a top priority because hundreds of thousands passengers a day take a subway. The station structures, which have been being operated since the 1970s, are especially vulnerable to the earthquake and long-term vibrations such as ambient train vibrations as well. This is why the structural-health monitoring system of station structures should be required. For these reason, Korean government has made an effort to develop the structural health-monitoring system of them, which can evaluate the health-state of station structures as well as can monitor the vulnerable structural members in real-time. Then, through the monitoring system, the vulnerable structural members could be retrofitted. For the development of health-state evaluation method for station structures with the real-time sensing data measured in the fields, authors carried out the numerical simulations to develop evaluation algorithms based on statistical pattern recognition techniques. In this study, the dynamic behavior of Chungmuro station in Seoul was numerically analyzed and then critical members were chosen. Damages were artificially simulated at the selected critical members of the numerical model. And, the supervised and unsupervised learning based pattern recognition algorithms were applied to quantify and localize the structural defects.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.561-576
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• 2022

Heritage timber structures represent the history and culture of a nation. These structures have been inherited from previous generations; however, they inevitably exhibit deterioration over time, potentially leading to structural deficiencies. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) offers the potential to assess operational anomalies, deterioration, and damage through processing and analysis of data collected from transducers and sensors mounted on the structure. This paper reports on the design and implementation of a long-term SHM system on the Feiyun Wooden Pavilion in China, a three-story timber building built more than 500 years ago. The principles and features of the design and implementation of SHM systems for heritage timber buildings are systematically discussed. In total, 104 sensors of 6 different types are deployed on the structure to monitor the environmental effects and structural responses, including air temperature and humidity, wind speed and direction, structural temperatures, strain, inclination, and acceleration. In addition, integrated data acquisition and transmission subsystem using a newly developed software platform are implemented. Selected preliminary statistical and correlation analysis using one year of monitoring data are presented to demonstrate the condition assessment capability of the system based on the monitoring data.