• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.715-728
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• 2022

Recently, numbers of long span pedestrian suspension bridges have been constructed worldwide. While recent tragedies regarding pedestrian suspension bridges have shown how these bridges can wreak havoc on the society, there are no specific guidelines for construction standards nor safety inspections yet. Therefore, a structural health monitoring system that could help ensure the safety of pedestrian suspension bridges are needed. System identification is one of the popular applications for structural health monitoring method, which estimates the dynamic system. Most of the system identification methods for bridges are currently adapting output-only system identification method, which assumes the dynamic load to be a white noise due to the difficulty of measuring the dynamic load. In the case of pedestrian suspension bridges, the pedestrian load is within specific frequency range, resulting in large errors when using the output-only system identification method. Therefore, this study aims to develop a system identification method for pedestrian suspension bridges considering both input and output of the dynamic system. This study estimates the location and the magnitude of the pedestrian load, as well as the dynamic response of the pedestrian bridges by utilizing artificial intelligence and computer vision techniques. A simulation-based validation test was conducted to verify the performance of the proposed system. The proposed method is expected to improve the accuracy and the efficiency of the current inspection and monitoring systems for pedestrian suspension bridges.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.541-553
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• 2015

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems can provide valuable information regarding the safety of structures during and after ground motions which can be used by authorities to reduce post-earthquake hazards. Strain gages as a key element play an important role in the success of SHM systems. Reducing the number of required strain gages while keeping the efficiency of SHM system not only can reduce the cost of structural health monitoring but also avoids storage and process of uninformative data. In this study, a method based on performance based seismic design of structures is proposed for ideal placement of stain gages in structures. The robustness and efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated through installation of strain gages on an Airport Traffic Control (ATC) Tower. The obtained results show that the number of required strain gages decrease significantly.

• Journal of Wind Energy
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.16-23
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• 2018

A damage detection method for the tripod support structure of offshore wind turbines is presented for structural health monitoring. A finite element model of a prototype tripod support structure is established and the modal properties are calculated. The degree and location of the damage are estimated based on the neural network technique using the changes of natural frequencies and mode shape due to the damage. The stress distribution occurring in the support structure is obtained by a dynamic analysis for the wind turbine system to select the output data of the neural network. The natural frequencies and mode shapes for 36 possible damage scenarios were used for the input data of the learned neural network for damage assessment. The estimated damages agreed reasonably well with the accurate ones. The presented method could be effectively applied for damage detection and structural health monitoring of various types of support structures of offshore wind turbines.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.27 no.6
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• pp.483-500
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• 2007

Emerging sensor-based structural health monitoring (SHM) technology can play an important role in inspecting and securing the safety of aging civil infrastructure, a worldwide problem. However, implementation of SHM in civil infrastructure faces a significant challenge due to the lack of suitable sensors and reliable methods for interpreting sensor data. This paper reviews recent efforts and advances made in addressing this challenge, with example sensor hardware and software developed in the author's research center. It is proposed to integrate real-time continuous monitoring using on structure sensors for global structural integrity evaluation with targeted NDE inspection for local damage assessment.

• 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.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.585-599
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• 2016

Steel cables serve as the key structural components in long-span bridges, and the force state of the steel cable is deemed to be one of the most important determinant factors representing the safety condition of bridge structures. The disadvantages of traditional cable force measurement methods have been envisaged and development of an effective alternative is still desired. In the last decade, the vision-based sensing technology has been rapidly developed and broadly applied in the field of structural health monitoring (SHM). With the aid of vision-based multi-point structural displacement measurement method, monitoring of the tensile force of the steel cable can be realized. In this paper, a novel cable force monitoring system integrated with a multi-point pattern matching algorithm is developed. The feasibility and accuracy of the developed vision-based force monitoring system has been validated by conducting the uniaxial tensile tests of steel bars, steel wire ropes, and parallel strand cables on a universal testing machine (UTM) as well as a series of moving loading experiments on a scale arch bridge model. The comparative study of the experimental outcomes indicates that the results obtained by the vision-based system are consistent with those measured by the traditional method for cable force measurement.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.244-256
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• 2010

Radio frequency identification(RFID) combined with wireless technology has good potential for structural health monitoring(SHM). We describe several advantages of RFID and wireless technologies for SHM, and review SHM examples with working principles, design and technical details for damage detection, heat exposure monitoring, force/strain sensing, and corrosion detection in concrete, steel, carbon fiber reinforced polymer(CFRP), and other materials. Various sensors combined with wireless communication are also discussed. These methodologies can be readily developed, implemented, and customized. There are some technical difficulties, but solutions are being addressed. Lastly, a surface acoustic wave-based RFID system is presented, and possible future trends of SHM based on RFID and wireless technology are presented.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.285-297
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• 2003

Complementing recent advances made in the field of structural health monitoring and damage detection, the concept of a wireless sensing network with distributed computational power is proposed. The fundamental building block of the proposed sensing network is a wireless sensing unit capable of acquiring measurement data, interrogating the data and transmitting the data in real time. The computational core of a prototype wireless sensing unit can potentially be utilized for execution of embedded engineering analyses such as damage detection and system identification. To illustrate the computational capabilities of the proposed wireless sensing unit, the fast Fourier transform and auto-regressive time-series modeling are locally executed by the unit. Fast Fourier transforms and auto-regressive models are two important techniques that have been previously used for the identification of damage in structural systems. Their embedment illustrates the computational capabilities of the prototype wireless sensing unit and suggests strong potential for unit installation in automated structural health monitoring systems.

• International Journal of High-Rise Buildings
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.37-51
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• 2012

New generation of tall and complex buildings systems are now introduced that are reflective of the latest development in materials, design, sustainability, construction, and IT technologies. While the complexity in design is being overcome by the availability and advances in structural analysis tools and readily advanced software, the design of these buildings are still reliant on minimum code requirements that yet to be validated in full scale. The involvement of the author in the design and construction planning of Burj Khalifa since its inception until its completion prompted the author to conceptually develop an extensive survey and real-time structural health monitoring program to validate all the fundamental assumptions mad for the design and construction planning of the tower. The Burj Khalifa Project is the tallest structure ever built by man; the tower is 828 meters tall and comprises of 162 floors above grade and 3 basement levels. Early integration of aerodynamic shaping and wind engineering played a major role in the architectural massing and design of this multi-use tower, where mitigating and taming the dynamic wind effects was one of the most important design criteria established at the onset of the project design. Understanding the structural and foundation system behaviors of the tower are the key fundamental drivers for the development and execution of a state-of-the-art survey and structural health monitoring (SHM) programs. Therefore, the focus of this paper is to discuss the execution of the survey and real-time structural health monitoring programs to confirm the structural behavioral response of the tower during construction stage and during its service life; the monitoring programs included 1) monitoring the tower's foundation system, 2) monitoring the foundation settlement, 3) measuring the strains of the tower vertical elements, 4) measuring the wall and column vertical shortening due to elastic, shrinkage and creep effects, 5) measuring the lateral displacement of the tower under its own gravity loads (including asymmetrical effects) resulting from immediate elastic and long term creep effects, 6) measuring the building lateral movements and dynamic characteristic in real time during construction, 7) measuring the building displacements, accelerations, dynamic characteristics, and structural behavior in real time under building permanent conditions, 8) and monitoring the Pinnacle dynamic behavior and fatigue characteristics. This extensive SHM program has resulted in extensive insight into the structural response of the tower, allowed control the construction process, allowed for the evaluation of the structural response in effective and immediate manner and it allowed for immediate correlation between the measured and the predicted behavior. The survey and SHM programs developed for Burj Khalifa will with no doubt pioneer the use of new survey techniques and the execution of new SHM program concepts as part of the fundamental design of building structures. Moreover, this survey and SHM programs will be benchmarked as a model for the development of future generation of SHM programs for all critical and essential facilities, however, but with much improved devices and technologies, which are now being considered by the author for another tall and complex building development, that is presently under construction.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.63 no.6
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• pp.751-760
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• 2017

In recent years, multifractal-based analysis methods have been widely applied in engineering. Among these methods, multifractal detrended cross-correlation analysis (MFDXA), a branch of fractal analysis, has been successfully applied in the fields of finance and biomedicine. For its great potential in reflecting the subtle characteristic among signals, a structural health monitoring (SHM) system based on MFDXA is proposed. In this system, damage assessment is conducted by exploiting the concept of multifractal theory to quantify the complexity of the vibration signal measured from a structure. According to the proposed algorithm, the damage condition is first distinguished by multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis. Subsequently, the relationship between the q-order, q-order detrended covariance, and length of segment is further explored. The dissimilarity between damaged and undamaged cases is visualized on contour diagrams, and the damage location can thus be detected using signals measured from different floors. Moreover, a damage index is proposed to efficiently enhance the SHM process. A seven-story benchmark structure, located at the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE), was employed for an experimental verification to demonstrate the performance of the proposed SHM algorithm. According to the results, the damage condition and orientation could be correctly identified using the MFDXA algorithm and the proposed damage index. Since only the ambient vibration signal is required along with a set of initial reference measurements, the proposed SHM system can provide a lower cost, efficient, and reliable monitoring process.