• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제1권2호
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• pp.141-158
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• 2005

A new design of distributed crack sensors based on the topological change of transmission line cables is presented for the condition assessment of reinforced concrete (RC) structures during and immediately after an earthquake event. This study is primarily focused on the performance of cable sensors under dynamic loading, particularly a feature that allows for some "memory" of the crack history of an RC member. This feature enables the post-earthquake condition assessment of structural members such as RC columns, in which the earthquake-induced cracks are closed immediately after an earthquake event due to gravity loads, and are visually undetectable. Factors affecting the onset of the feature were investigated experimentally with small-scale RC beams under cyclic loading. Test results indicated that both crack width and the number of loading cycles were instrumental in the onset of the memory feature of cable sensors. Practical issues related to dynamic acquisition with the sensors are discussed. The sensors were proven to be fatigue resistant from shake table tests of RC columns. The sensors continued to show useful performance after the columns can no longer support additional loads.

• Wind and Structures
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• 제2권3호
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• pp.133-150
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• 1999

Significant costs to the public and private sectors due to recent extreme wind events have motivated the need for systematic post-hurricane damage data collection and analysis. Current post disaster data are collected by many different interested groups such as government agencies, voluntary disaster relief agencies, representatives of media companies, academicians and companies in the private sector. Each group has an interest in a particular type of data. However, members of each group collect data using different techniques. This disparity in data is not conducive to quantifying damage data and, therefore, inhibits the statistical and spatial description of damage and comparisons of damage among different extreme wind events. The data collection does not allow comparisons of data or results of analyses within a group and also prohibits comparison of damage data and information among different groups. Typically, analyses of data from a given event lead to different conclusion depending upon the definition of damage used by individual investigators and the type of data collected making it difficult for members of groups to compare the results of their analyses with a common language and basis. A formal method of data collection and analysis-within any single group-would allow comparisons to be made among different individuals, hazardous events and eventually among different groups, thus facilitating the management and reduction of damage due to future disaster. This research introduces a definition of damage to single family dwellings, and a common method of data collection and analysis suited for groups interested in regional characterization of damage. The current state-of-data is presented and a method for data collection is recommended based on these existing data collection methods. A fixed-scale damage index is proposed to consider the damage to a dwelling's feature. Finally, the damage index is applied to three dwellings damaged by Hurricane Iniki (1992). The damage index reflects the reduced functionality of a structure as a single family detached dwelling and provides a means to evaluate regional damage due to a single event or to compare damage due to events of different severity. Evaluation of the damage index and the data available support recommendation for future data collection efforts.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제31권4호
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• pp.365-381
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• 2023

The existing vision-based techniques for inspection and condition assessment of civil infrastructure are mostly manual and consequently time-consuming, expensive, subjective, and risky. As a viable alternative, researchers in the past resorted to deep learning-based autonomous damage detection algorithms for expedited post-disaster reconnaissance of structures. Although a number of automatic damage detection algorithms have been proposed, the scarcity of labeled training data remains a major concern. To address this issue, this study proposed a semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework based on consistency regularization and cross-supervision. Image data from post-earthquake reconnaissance, that contains cracks, spalling, and exposed rebars are used to evaluate the proposed solution. Experiments are carried out under different data partition protocols, and it is shown that the proposed SSL method can make use of unlabeled images to enhance the segmentation performance when limited amount of ground truth labels are provided. This study also proposes DeepLab-AASPP and modified versions of U-Net++ based on channel-wise attention mechanism to better segment the components and damage areas from images of reinforced concrete buildings. The channel-wise attention mechanism can effectively improve the performance of the network by dynamically scaling the feature maps so that the networks can focus on more informative feature maps in the concatenation layer. The proposed DeepLab-AASPP achieves the best performance on component segmentation and damage state segmentation tasks with mIoU scores of 0.9850 and 0.7032, respectively. For crack, spalling, and rebar segmentation tasks, modified U-Net++ obtains the best performance with Igou scores (excluding the background pixels) of 0.5449, 0.9375, and 0.5018, respectively. The proposed architectures win the second place in IC-SHM2021 competition in all five tasks of Project 2.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• 제49권4호
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• pp.407-417
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• 2023

After a disaster like the catastrophic earthquake, the government have to use rapid assessment of the condition (or damage) of bridges, buildings and other infrastructures is mandatory for rapid feedbacks, rescue and post-event management. Many domain schemes based on the measured vibration computations, including least squares estimation and neural fuzzy logic control, have been studied and found to be effective for online/offline monitoring of structural damage. Traditional strategies require all external stimulus data (input data) which have been measured available, but this may not be the generalized for all structures. In this article, a new method with unknown inputs (excitations) is provided to identify structural matrix such as stiffness, mass, damping and other nonlinear parts, unknown disturbances for example. An analytical solution is thus constructed and presented because the solution in the existing literature has not been available. The goals of this paper are towards access to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services, promotion of inclusive and sustainable urbanization and participation, implementation of sustainable and disaster-resilient buildings, sustainable human settlement planning and manage. Simulation results of linear and nonlinear structures show that the proposed method is able to identify structural parameters and their changes due to damage and unknown excitations. Therefore, the goal is believed to achieved in the near future by the ongoing development of AI and control theory.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• 제52권5호
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• pp.571-581
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• 2024

After a disaster like the catastrophic earthquake, the government have to use rapid assessment of the condition (or damage) of bridges, buildings and other infrastructures is mandatory for rapid feedbacks, rescue and post-event management. This work studies the tracking control problem of a class of strict-feedback nonlinear systems with input saturation nonlinearity. Under the framework of dynamic surface control design, RBF neural networks are introduced to approximate the unknown nonlinear dynamics. In order to address the impact of input saturation nonlinearity in the system, an auxiliary control system is constructed, and by introducing a class of first-order low-pass filters, the problems of large computation and computational explosion caused by repeated differentiation are effectively solved. In response to unknown parameters, corresponding adaptive updating control laws are designed. The goals of this paper are towards access to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services, promotion of inclusive and sustainable urbanization and participation, implementation of sustainable and disaster-resilient buildings, sustainable human settlement planning and manage. Simulation results of linear and nonlinear structures show that the proposed method is able to identify structural parameters and their changes due to damage and unknown excitations. Therefore, the goal is believed to achieved in the near future by the ongoing development of AI and control theory.