• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• 제2권1호
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• pp.77-93
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• 2015

The idea of using measured dynamic characteristics for damage detection is attractive because it allows for a global evaluation of the structural health and condition. However, vibration-based damage detection for complex structures such as long-span cable-supported bridges still remains a challenge. As a suspension or cable-stayed bridge involves in general thousands of structural components, the conventional damage detection methods based on model updating and/or parameter identification might result in ill-conditioning and non-uniqueness in the solution of inverse problems. Alternatively, methods that utilize, to the utmost extent, information from forward problems and avoid direct solution to inverse problems would be more suitable for vibration-based damage detection of long-span cable-supported bridges. The auto-associative neural network (ANN) technique and the probabilistic neural network (PNN) technique, that both eschew inverse problems, have been proposed for identifying and locating damage in suspension and cable-stayed bridges. Without the help of a structural model, ANNs with appropriate configuration can be trained using only the measured modal frequencies from healthy structure under varying environmental conditions, and a new set of modal frequency data acquired from an unknown state of the structure is then fed into the trained ANNs for damage presence identification. With the help of a structural model, PNNs can be configured using the relative changes of modal frequencies before and after damage by assuming damage at different locations, and then the measured modal frequencies from the structure can be presented to locate the damage. However, such formulated ANNs and PNNs may still be incompetent to identify damage occurring at the deck members of a cable-supported bridge because of very low modal sensitivity to the damage. The present study endeavors to enhance the damage identification capability of ANNs and PNNs when being applied for identification of damage incurred at deck members. Effort is first made to construct combined modal parameters which are synthesized from measured modal frequencies and modal shape components to train ANNs for damage alarming. With the purpose of improving identification accuracy, effort is then made to configure PNNs for damage localization by adapting the smoothing parameter in the Bayesian classifier to different values for different pattern classes. The performance of the ANNs with their input being modal frequencies and the combined modal parameters respectively and the PNNs with constant and adaptive smoothing parameters respectively is evaluated through simulation studies of identifying damage inflicted on different deck members of the double-deck suspension Tsing Ma Bridge.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제22권5호
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• pp.631-641
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• 2018

This paper outlines a computational procedure for the effective merging of diverse sensor measurements, displacement and acceleration signals in particular, in order to successfully monitor and simulate the current health condition of civil structures under dynamic loadings. In particular, it investigates a Kalman Filter implementation for the Heterogeneous Data Fusion of displacement and acceleration response signals of a structural system toward dynamic identification purposes. The procedure is perspectively aimed at enhancing extensive remote displacement measurements (commonly affected by high noise), by possibly integrating them with a few standard acceleration measurements (considered instead as noise-free or corrupted by slight noise only). Within the data fusion analysis, a Kalman Filter algorithm is implemented and its effectiveness in improving noise-corrupted displacement measurements is investigated. The performance of the filter is assessed based on the RMS error between the original (noise-free, numerically-determined) displacement signal and the Kalman Filter displacement estimate, and on the structural modal parameters (natural frequencies) that can be extracted from displacement signals, refined through the combined use of displacement and acceleration recordings, through inverse analysis algorithms for output-only modal dynamics identification, based on displacements.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제62권6호
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• pp.709-717
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• 2017

This paper develops a two-stage method for structural damage identification by using modal data. First, the Residual Force Vector (RFV) is introduced to detect any potentially damaged elements of structures. Second, data of the frequency domain are used to build up the objective function, and then the Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) is utilized to estimate damaged extents. ICA is a heuristic algorithm with simple structure, which is easy to be implemented and it is effective to deal with high-dimension nonlinear optimization problem. The advantages of this present method are: (1) Calculation complexity can be decreased greatly after eliminating many intact elements in the first step. (2) Robustness, ICA ensures the robustness of the proposed method. Various damaged cases and different structures are investigated in numerical simulations. From these results, anyone can point out that the present algorithm is effective and robust for structural damage identification and is also better than many other heuristic algorithms.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제17권6호
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• pp.903-915
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• 2016

The classical Kalman filter (KF) provides a practical and efficient state estimation approach for structural identification and vibration control. However, the classical KF approach is applicable only when external inputs are assumed known. Over the years, some approaches based on Kalman filter with unknown inputs (KF-UI) have been presented. However, these approaches based solely on acceleration measurements are inherently unstable which leads poor tracking and so-called drifts in the estimated unknown inputs and structural displacement in the presence of measurement noises. Either on-line regularization schemes or post signal processing is required to treat the drifts in the identification results, which prohibits the real-time identification of joint structural state and unknown inputs. In this paper, it is aimed to extend the classical KF approach to circumvent the above limitation for real time joint estimation of structural states and the unknown inputs. Based on the scheme of the classical KF, analytical recursive solutions of an improved Kalman filter with unknown excitations (KF-UI) are derived and presented. Moreover, data fusion of partially measured displacement and acceleration responses is used to prevent in real time the so-called drifts in the estimated structural state vector and unknown external inputs. The effectiveness and performance of the proposed approach are demonstrated by some numerical examples.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제40권1호
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• pp.13-28
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• 2011

An effective method for detection linear flaws in plate structures via two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform is proposed in this study. The proposed method was applied to a four-fixed supported rectangular plate containing damage with arbitrary length, depth and location. Numerical results identifying the damage location are compared with the actual results to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Also, a wavelet-based method presented for de-noising of mode shape of plate. Finally, the performance of the proposed method for de-noising and damage identification was verified using experimental data. Comparison between the location detected by the proposed method, and the plate's actual damage location revealed that the methodology can be used as an accessible and effective technique for damage identification of actual plate structures.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제15권3호
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• pp.735-749
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• 2015

The major difficulty of using Bayesian probabilistic inference for system identification is to obtain the posterior probability density of parameters conditioned by the measured response. The posterior density of structural parameters indicates how plausible each model is when considering the uncertainty of prediction errors. The Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method is a widespread medium for posterior inference but its convergence is often slow. The differential evolution adaptive Metropolis-Hasting (DREAM) algorithm boasts a population-based mechanism, which nms multiple different Markov chains simultaneously, and a global optimum exploration ability. This paper proposes an improved differential evolution adaptive Metropolis-Hasting algorithm (IDREAM) strategy to estimate the posterior density of structural parameters. The main benefit of IDREAM is its efficient MCMC simulation through its use of the adaptive Metropolis (AM) method with a mutation strategy for ensuring quick convergence and robust solutions. Its effectiveness was demonstrated in simulations on identifying the structural parameters with limited output data and noise polluted measurements.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제17권6호
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• pp.819-828
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• 2004

A new process for estimating the natural frequency and the corresponding damping ratio in large structures is discussed. In a practical situation, it is very difficult to analyze large structures precisely because they are too complex to model using the finite element method and too heavy to excite using the exciting force method; in particular, the measured signals are seriously influenced by ambient noise. In order to identify the structural impulse response associated with the information of natural frequency and the corresponding damping ratio in large structures, the analysis process, a so-called "multiresolution blind system identification algorithm" which combines Mallat algorithm and the bicepstrum method. High time-frequency concentration is attained and the phase information is kept. The experimental result has demonstrated that the new analysis process exploiting the natural frequency and the corresponding damping ratio of structural response are useful tools in structural analysis application.

• International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences
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• 제17권2호
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• pp.184-194
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• 2016

In existing identification methods for on-orbit spacecraft, such as eigensystem realization algorithm (ERA) and subspace method identification (SMI), singular value decomposition (SVD) is used frequently to estimate the modal parameters. However, these identification methods are often used to process the linear time-invariant system, and there is a lower computation efficiency using the SVD when the system order of spacecraft is high. In this study, to improve the computational efficiency in identifying time-varying modal parameters of large spacecraft, a faster recursive algorithm called fast approximated power iteration (FAPI) is employed. This approach avoids the SVD and can be provided as an alternative spacecraft identification method, and the latest modal parameters obtained can be applied for updating the controller parameters timely (e.g. the self-adaptive control problem). In numerical simulations, two large flexible spacecraft models, the Engineering Test Satellite-VIII (ETS-VIII) and Soil Moisture Active/Passive (SMAP) satellite, are established. The identification results show that this recursive algorithm can obtain the time-varying modal parameters, and the computation time is reduced significantly.

• 한국전산구조공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국전산구조공학회 2005년도 춘계 학술발표회 논문집
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• pp.556-563
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• 2005

This paper proposed a new substructural identification method to estimate the bending stiffness of a bridge deck, a fundamental structural health index of a super-structure. The proposed method can estimate the bending stiffness without considering actual supporting conditions by using substructural identification method while most of conventional methods need reasonable assumptions on supporting conditions which are hard to be assessed in a real bridge in operation. The mathematical formulation is derived and the results of laboratory tests are summarized. It was verified that the proposed method gives consistent estimation results regardless of actual supporting conditions.

• 한국철도학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국철도학회 2008년도 춘계학술대회 논문집
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• pp.56-64
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• 2008

To maintain effectively the functionality of major railroad facilities such as bridges, identifying and evaluating damage in a structure and taking appropriate action via continuous structural health monitoring are very important. However, most damage identification methods for structural health monitoring developed to date utilize modal domain responses which inevitably contain errors in transforming the domain of responses. In this paper, a damage identification method using time-domain operational deflection shapes is proposed. Since the proposed method utilizes time-domain responses, the error in the process of transformation to response domain can be avoided, and the accuracy of structural health evaluation can be improved. The feasibility of the proposed method is verified via a numerical example of a simple bridge structure.