• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.849-868
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• 2014

An indirect approach is explored for structural health bridge monitoring allowing for wide, yet cost-effective, bridge stock coverage. The detection capability of the approach is tested in a laboratory setting for three different reversible proxy types of damage scenarios: changes in the support conditions (rotational restraint), additional damping, and an added mass at the midspan. A set of frequency features is used in conjunction with a support vector machine classifier on data measured from a passing vehicle at the wheel and suspension levels, and directly from the bridge structure for comparison. For each type of damage, four levels of severity were explored. The results show that for each damage type, the classification accuracy based on data measured from the passing vehicle is, on average, as good as or better than the classification accuracy based on data measured from the bridge. Classification accuracy showed a steady trend for low (1-1.75 m/s) and high vehicle speeds (2-2.75 m/s), with a decrease of about 7% for the latter. These results show promise towards a highly mobile structural health bridge monitoring system for wide and cost-effective bridge stock coverage.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.207-223
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• 2018

In this inquisition, a passive damper namely Stockbridge Damper (SBD) has been introduced to the field of vibration control of Offshore Wind Turbine (OWT) to reduce the earthquake excitations. The dynamic responses of the structure have been analyzed for three recorded earthquakes and the responses have been assessed. To find an optimum SBD, the parameters of damper have been optimized using Response Surface Methodology (RSM) based on Box-Behnken Design (BBD) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The influence of the design variables of SBD such as the diameter of messenger cable, the length of messenger cable and logarithmic decrement of the damping has been investigated through response variables such as maximum displacement, RMS displacement and frequency amplitude of structure under an artificially generated white noise. After that, the structure with optimized and non-optimized damper has been analyzed with under the same earthquakes. Moreover, the comparative results show that the structure with optimized damper is 11.78%, 18.71%, 11.6% and 7.77%, 7.01%, 10.23% more effective than the structure with non-optimized damper with respect to the displacement and frequency response under the earthquakes. The results show that the SBD can obviously affect the characteristics of the vibration of the OWT and RSM based on BBD and PSO approach can provide an optimum damper.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.41-57
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• 2011

A deeper understanding of the effectiveness of adopting devices mounting shape memory alloy (SMA) elements in applications targeted to the mitigation of vibrations is pursued via an experimental approach. During a seismic event, less than 1000 loading-unloading cycles of the alloy are required to mitigate the earthquake effects. However, the aging effects during the time of inactivity prior to the oscillations (several decades characterized by the yearly summer-winter temperature wave) should be considered in order to avoid and/or minimize them. In this paper, the results obtained by carrying out, in different laboratories, fatigue tests on SMA specimens are compared and discussed. Furthermore, the effects of seismic events on a steel structure, with and without SMA dampers, are numerically simulated using ANSYS. Under an earthquake excitation, the SMA devices halve the oscillation amplitudes and show re-centering properties. To confirm this result, an experimental campaign is conducted by actually installing the proposed devices on a physical model of the structure and by evaluating their performance under different excitations induced by an actuator.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.10 no.6
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• pp.557-572
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• 2012

This paper focuses on the vibration control of long-span reticulated steel structures under multi-dimensional earthquake excitation. The control system and strategy are constructed based on Magneto-Rheological (MR) dampers. The LQR and Hrovat controlling algorithm is adopted to determine optimal MR damping force, while the modified Bingham model (MBM) and inverse neural network (INN) is proposed to solve the real-time controlling current. Three typical long-span reticulated structural systems are detailedly analyzed, including the double-layer cylindrical reticulated shell, single-layer spherical reticulated shell, and cable suspended arch-truss structure. Results show that the proposed control strategy can reduce the displacement and acceleration effectively for three typical structural systems. The displacement control effect under the earthquake excitation with different PGA is similar, while for the cable suspended arch-truss, the acceleration control effect increase distinctly with the earthquake excitation intensity. Moreover, for the cable suspended arch-truss, the strand stress variation can also be effectively reduced by the MR dampers, which is very important for this kind of structure to ensure that the cable would not be destroyed or relaxed.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.641-656
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• 2017

The effects of vertical component of earthquakes on torsional amplification due to mass eccentricity in seismic responses of base-isolated structures subjected to near-field ground motions are studied in this paper. 3-, 6- and 9-story superstructures and aspect ratios of 1, 2 and 3 have been modeled as steel special moment frames mounted on Triple Concave Friction Pendulum (TCFP) bearings considering different period and damping ratios. Three-dimensional linear superstructures resting on nonlinear isolators are subjected to both 2 and 3 component near-field ground motions. Effects of mass eccentricity and vertical component of 25 near-field earthquakes on the seismic responses including maximum isolator displacement and base shear as well as peak superstructure acceleration are studied. The results indicate that the effect of vertical component on the responses of asymmetric structures, especially on the base shear is significant. Therefore, it can be claimed that in the absence of the vertical component, mass eccentricity has a little effect on the base shear increase. Additionally, the impact of this component on acceleration is remarkable so the roof acceleration of a nine-story structure has been increased 1.67 times, compared to the case that the structure is subjected to only horizontal components of earthquakes.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.279-284
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• 2020

Electrical current is usually used to change the damping force of Magnetorheological Dampers (MRDs). However, changing the electrical current could shift the stiffness of the system, the phenomenon that was not considered carefully. This study aims to evaluate this shift. A typical MRD was designed, optimized, and fabricated to do some accurate and detailed experimental tests to examine the stiffness variation. The damper is equipped with a circulating system to prevent the deposition of particles when it is at rest. Besides that, a vibration setup was developed for the experimental study. It is capable of generating vibration with either constant frequency or frequency sweep and measure the amplitude of vibration. The damper was tested by the vibrating setup, and it was concluded that with a change in electrical current from 0 to 1.4 A, resonant frequency would change from 13.8 Hz to 16 Hz. Considering the unchanging mass of 85.1 kg, the change in resonant frequency translates as a shift in stiffness, which changes from 640 kN/m to 860 kN/m.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.127-140
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• 2006

In this study, a wavelet-based covariance-driven system identification technique is proposed for damage assessment of structures under ambient excitation. Assuming the ambient excitation to be a white-noise process, the covariance computation is shown to be able to separate the effect of random excitation from the response measurement. Wavelet transform (WT) is then used to convert the covariance response in the time domain to the WT magnitude plot in the time-scale plane. The wavelet coefficients along the curves where energy concentrated are extracted and used to estimate the modal properties of the structure. These modal property estimations lead to the calculation of the stiffness matrix when either the spectral density of the random loading or the mass matrix is given. The predicted stiffness matrix hence provides a direct assessment on the possible location and severity of damage which results in stiffness alteration. To demonstrate the proposed wavelet-based damage assessment technique, a numerical example on a 3 degree-of-freedom (DOF) system and an experimental study on a three-story building model, which are all under a broad-band excitation, are presented. Both numerical and experimental results illustrate that the proposed technique can provide an accurate assessment on the damage location. It is however noted that the assessment of damage severity is not as accurate, which might be due to the errors associated with the mode shape estimations as well as the assumption of proportional damping adopted in the formulation.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.7 no.5
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• pp.417-432
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• 2011

The present paper is devoted to vibration canceling and shape control of piezoelastic slender beams. Taking into account the presence of electric networks, an extended electromechanically coupled Bernoulli-Euler beam theory for passive piezoelectric composite structures is shortly introduced in the first part of our contribution. The second part of the paper deals with the concept of passive shape control of beams using shaped piezoelectric layers and tuned inductive networks. It is shown that an impedance matching and a shaping condition must be fulfilled in order to perfectly cancel vibrations due to an arbitrary harmonic load for a specific frequency. As a main result of the present paper, the correctness of the theory of passive shape control is demonstrated for a harmonically excited piezoelelastic cantilever by a finite element calculation based on one-dimensional Bernoulli-Euler beam elements, as well as by the commercial finite element code of ANSYS using three-dimensional solid elements. Finally, an outlook for the practical importance of the passive shape control concept is given: It is shown that harmonic vibrations of a beam with properly shaped layers according to the presented passive shape control theory, which are attached to an resistor-inductive circuit (RL-circuit), can be significantly reduced over a large frequency range compared to a beam with uniformly distributed piezoelectric layers.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.33-46
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• 2012

To reduce the vibration of cable-stayed bridges, conventional magnetorheological (MR) damper control system (CMRDS), with separate power supply, sensors and controllers, is widely investigated. In this paper, to improve the reliability and performance of the control system, one adaptive MR damper control system (AMRDS) consisting of MR damper and piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH) is proposed. According to piezoelectric effect, PEH can produce energy for powering MR damper. The energy is proportional to the product of the cable displacement and velocity. Due to the damping force changing with the energy, the new system can be adjustable to reduce the cable vibration. Compared with CMRDS, the new system is structurally simplified, replacing external sensor, power supply and controller with PEH. In the paper, taking the N26 cable of Shandong Binzhou Yellow River Bridge as example, the design method for the whole AMRDS is given, and simple formulas for PEH are derived. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive control system, the performance is compared with active control case and simple Bang-Bang semi-active control case. It is shown that AMRDS is better than simple Bang-Bang semi-active control case, and still needed to be improved in comparison with active control case.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.295-306
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• 2019

Shanghai Tower is a 632-meter super high-rise building located in an area with wind and active earthquake. A sophisticated structural health monitoring (SHM) system consisting of more than 400 sensors has been built to carry out a long-term monitoring for its operational safety. In this paper, a reduced-order model including 31 elements was generated from a full model of this super tall building. An iterative regularized matrix method was proposed to tune the system parameters, making the dynamic characteristic of the reduced-order model be consistent with those in the full model. The updating reduced-order model can be regarded as a benchmark model for further analysis. A long-term monitoring for structural dynamic characteristics of Shanghai Tower under different construction stages was also investigated. The identified results, including natural frequency and damping ratio, were discussed. Based on the data collected from the SHM system, the dynamic characteristics of the whole structure was investigated. Compared with the result of the finite element model, a good agreement can be observed. The result provides a valuable reference for examining the evolution of future dynamic characteristics of this super tall building.