• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.51-69
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• 2016

Monitoring the performance and estimating the remaining useful life of aging civil infrastructure in the United States has been identified as a major objective in the civil engineering community. Structural health monitoring has emerged as a central tool to fulfill this objective. This paper presents a review of the major structural monitoring programs that have been recently implemented in the United States, focusing on the integrity and performance assessment of large-scale structural systems. Applications where response data from a monitoring program have been used to detect and correct structural deficiencies are highlighted. These applications include (but are not limited to): i) Post-earthquake damage assessment of buildings and bridges; ii) Monitoring of cables vibration in cable-stayed bridges; iii) Evaluation of the effectiveness of technologies for retrofit and seismic protection, such as base isolation systems; and iv) Structural damage assessment of bridges after impact loads resulting from ship collisions. These and many other applications show that a structural health monitoring program is a powerful tool for structural damage and condition assessment, that can be used as part of a comprehensive decision-making process about possible actions that can be undertaken in a large-scale civil infrastructure system after potentially damaging events.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2003.04a
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• pp.95-102
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• 2003

To define an analytical model for a structural system or to assess damage in the system, system identification(SI) methods have been developed and widely applied. The paper presents a method of determining optimal sensor location(OSL) based on the maximum likelihood approach, which is applicable to modal SI methods. To estimate unknown parameters reliably, it is necessary that the information provided by the experiment should be maximized. By applying the Cramer-Rao inequality, a Fisher information matrix in terms of the probability density function of measurements is obtained from a lower bound of the estimation error. The paper also proposes a scheme of determining of OSL on damaged structures by using maximum strain energy factor. Simulation studies have carried out to investigate the proposed OSL algorithm for both undamaged and damaged structures.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.87-94
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• 1997

This research aims to develop an algorithm of optimal transducer placement using Kinetic Energy of the structural system. The structural vibration response-based health monitoring is considered one of the best for the system which requires a long-term, continuous monitoring. In its experimental modal testing, however, it is difficult to decide on the measurement locations and their number, especially for complex structures, which have a major influence on the quality of the results. In order to minimize the number of sensing operations and optimize the transducer location while maximizing the accuracy of results, this paper discusses about an optimum transducer placement criterion suitable for the identification of structural damage. As a criterion algorithm, it proposes the Kinetic Energy Optimization Technique (EOT), and then addresses the numerical issues which are subsequently applicable to actual experiment where a bridge model is used. By using the experimental data, it compares the EOT with the EIM (Effective Independence Method) which is generally used to optimize the transducer placement for the damage identification and control purposes. The comparison conclusively shows that the EOT algorithm proposed in this paper is preferable when a structure is to be instrumented with fewer sensors.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Industry Convergence
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.205-212
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• 2005

This paper presents the application of system identification approaches for the load carrying capacity evaluation of composite PCI girder bridges based on the result of field test. For these problems, the moment of inertia of cross-sectional area and the natural frequency of bridge were used as structural parameters, the SAP2000 program for the structural analysis and the SLP method for the minimum error. As a result, it is found that the proposed algorithm for this study appears applicable to real structures with reasonable complexity. It is shown that the introduction of approximate quadratic equations is more realistic and timesaving than the common methods.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.527-538
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• 2010

This paper presents a nondestructive evaluation approach for system identification (SID) of real railway bridges using field vibration test results. First, a multi-phase SID scheme designed on the basis of eigenvalue sensitivity concept is presented. Next, the proposed multi-phase approach is evaluated from field vibration tests on a real railway bridge (Wondongcheon bridge) located in Yangsan, Korea. On the steel girder bridge, a few natural frequencies and mode shapes are experimentally measured under the ambient vibration condition. The corresponding modal parameters are numerically calculated from a three-dimensional finite element (FE) model established for the target bridge. Eigenvalue sensitivities are analyzed for potential model-updating parameters of the FE model. Then, structural subsystems are identified phase-by-phase using the proposed model-updating procedure. Based on model-updating results, a baseline model and a nondestructive evaluation of test bridge are identified.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2003.04a
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• pp.443-450
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• 2003

System identification techniques can be used to build a baseline modal model for a flawed structure that has no modal information on its as-built state. The accuracy of a system identification proposed by Stubbs and Kim is analyzed for plate-girder bridges and its impact on the accuracy of damage detection in those structures is also analyzed. A laboratory-scale model plate-girder is experimentally tested and the initial four bending modes are examined for certain damage scenarios. The performance of individual baseline modal models is assessed by detecting damage in the model structure.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.78 no.3
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• pp.369-378
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• 2021

This paper reviewed a few output-only system identification algorithms and identified the shortcomings of those popular blind source separation methods. To address the issues such as less sensors than the targeted modal modes (under-determinate problem), repeated natural frequencies as well as systems with complex mode shapes, this paper proposed a complex wavelet modified second order blind identification method (CWMSOBI) by transforming the time domain problem into time-frequency domain. The wavelet coefficients with different dominant frequencies can be used to address the under-determinate problem, while complex mode shapes are addressed by introducing the complex wavelet transformation. Numerical simulations with both high and low signal-to-noise ratios validate that CWMSOBI can overcome the above-mentioned issues while obtaining more accurate identified results than other blind identification methods.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.151-167
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• 2015

Instrumentation on structural health monitoring system imposes critical issues for applying the structural monitoring system to real world structures, for which not only on the configuration and geometry, but also aesthetics on the system to be monitored should be considered. To illustrate this point, two real world structural health monitoring systems, the structural health monitoring system of Shenzhen Vanke Center and the structural health monitoring system of Shenzhen Bay Stadium in China, are presented in the paper. The instrumentation on structural health monitoring systems of real world structures is addressed by providing the description of the structure, the purpose of the structural health monitoring system implementation, as well as details of the system integration including the installations on the sensors and acquisition equipment and so on. In addition, an intelligent algorithm on stress identification using measurements from multi-region is presented in the paper. The stress identification method is deployed using the fuzzy pattern recognition and Dempster-Shafer evidence theory, where the measurements of limited strain sensors arranged on structure are the input data of the method. As results, at the critical parts of the structure, the stress distribution evaluated from the measurements has shown close correlation to the numerical simulation results on the steel roof of the Beijing National Aquatics Center in China. The research work in this paper can provide a reference for the design and implementation of both real world structural health monitoring systems and intelligent algorithm to identify stress distribution effectively.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.179-197
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• 2012

This study presents the findings of the structural health monitoring and the real time system identification of one of the first large scale building instrumentations in Turkey for earthquake safety. Within this context, a thorough review of steps in the instrumentation, monitoring is presented and seismic performance evaluation of structures using both nonlinear pushover and nonlinear dynamic time history analysis is carried out. The sensor locations are determined using the optimal sensor placement techniques used in NASA for on orbit modal identification of large space structures. System identification is carried out via the stochastic subspace technique. The results of the study show that under ambient vibrations, stocky buildings can be substantially stiffer than what is predicted by the finite element models due to the presence of a large number of partitioning walls. However, in a severe earthquake, it will not be safe to rely on this resistance due to the fact that once the partitioning walls crack, the bare frame contributes to the lateral stiffness of the building alone. Consequently, the periods obtained from system identification will be closer to those obtained from the FE analysis. A technique to control the validity of the proportional damping assumption is employed that checks the presence of phase difference in displacements of different stories obtained from band pass filtered records and it is confirmed that the "proportional damping assumption" is valid for this structure. Two different techniques are implemented for identifying the influence of the soil structure interaction. The first technique uses the transfer function between the roof and the basement in both directions. The second technique uses a pre-whitening filter on the data obtained from both the basement and the roof. Subsequently the impulse response function is computed from the scaled cross correlation between the input and the output. The overall results showed that the structure will satisfy the life safety performance level in a future earthquake but some soil structure interaction effects should be expected in the North South direction.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.683-698
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• 2015

Railroad bridges form an integral part of railway infrastructure throughout the world. To accommodate increased axel loads, train speeds, and greater volumes of freight traffic, in the presence of changing structural conditions, the load carrying capacity and serviceability of existing bridges must be assessed. One way is through system identification of in-service railroad bridges. To dates, numerous researchers have reported system identification studies with a large portion of their applications being highway bridges. Moreover, most of those models are calibrated at global level, while only a few studies applications have used globally and locally calibrated model. To reach the global and local calibration, both ambient vibration tests and controlled tests need to be performed. Thus, an approach for system identification of a railroad bridge that can be used to assess the bridge in global and local sense is needed. This study presents system identification of a railroad bridge using free vibration data. Wireless smart sensors are employed and provided a portable way to collect data that is then used to determine bridge frequencies and mode shapes. Subsequently, a calibrated finite element model of the bridge provides global and local information of the bridge. The ability of the model to simulate local responses is validated by comparing predicted and measured strain in one of the diagonal members of the truss. This research demonstrates the potential of using measured field data to perform model calibration in a simple and practical manner that will lead to better understanding the state of railroad bridges.