• 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.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.41-55
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• 2015

This study proposes a laser based impedance measurement system and impedance based pipe corrosion and bolt-loosening monitoring techniques under temperature variations. For impedance measurement, the laser based impedance measurement system is optimized and adopted in this paper. First, a modulated laser beam is radiated to a photodiode, converting the laser beam into an electric signal. Then, the electric signal is applied to a MFC transducer attached on a target structure for ultrasonic excitation. The corresponding impedance signals are measured, re-converted into a laser beam, and radiated back to the other photodiode located in a data interrogator. The transmitted impedance signals are treated with an outlier analysis using generalized extreme value (GEV) statistics to reliably signal off structural damage. Validation of the proposed technique is carried out to detect corrosion and bolt-loosening in lab-scale carbon steel elbow pipes under varying temperatures. It has been demonstrated that the proposed technique has a potential to be used for structural health monitoring (SHM) of pipe structures.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.71 no.2
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• pp.175-183
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• 2019

This paper deals with damage detection in a girder bridge using transmissibility functions as input data to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). The original contribution in this work is that these two novel methods are combined to detect damage in a bridge. The damage was simulated in a real bridge in Vietnam, i.e. Ca-Non Bridge. Finite Element Method (FEM) of this bridge was used to show the reliability of the proposed technique. The vibration responses at some points of the bridge under a moving truck are simulated and used to calculate the transmissibility functions. These functions are then used as input data to train the ANNs, in which the target is the location and the severity of the damage in the bridge. After training successfully, the network can be used to assess the damage. Although simulated responses data are used in this paper, the practical application of the technique to real bridge data is potentially high.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.279-293
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• 2019

To ensure high quality data being used for data mining or feature extraction in the bridge structural health monitoring (SHM) system, a practical sensor fault diagnosis methodology has been developed based on the similarity of symmetric structure responses. First, the similarity of symmetric response is discussed using field monitoring data from different sensor types. All the sensors are initially paired and sensor faults are then detected pair by pair to achieve the multi-fault diagnosis of sensor systems. To resolve the coupling response issue between structural damage and sensor fault, the similarity for the target zone (where the studied sensor pair is located) is assessed to determine whether the localized structural damage or sensor fault results in the dissimilarity of the studied sensor pair. If the suspected sensor pair is detected with at least one sensor being faulty, field test could be implemented to support the regression analysis based on the monitoring and field test data for sensor fault isolation and reconstruction. Finally, a case study is adopted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. As a result, Dasarathy's information fusion model is adopted for multi-sensor information fusion. Euclidean distance is selected as the index to assess the similarity. In conclusion, the proposed method is practical for actual engineering which ensures the reliability of further analysis based on monitoring data.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.735-751
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• 2020

Identification of structure parameters is crucial in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) context for activities such as model validation, damage assessment and signal processing of structure response. In this paper, guided waves generated by piezoelectric transducers are used for in-situ and non-destructive structural parameter estimation based on Bayesian approach. As Bayesian approach needs iterative process, which is computationally expensive, this paper proposes a method in which an analytical model is selected and developed in order to decrease computational time and complexity of modeling. An experimental set-up is implemented to estimate three target elastic and geometrical parameters: Young's modulus, Poisson ratio and thickness of aluminum and steel plates. Experimental and simulated data are combined in a Bayesian framework for parameter identification. A significant accuracy is achieved regarding estimation of target parameters with maximum error of 8, 11 and 17 percent respectively. Moreover, the limitation of analytical model concerning boundary reflections is addressed and managed experimentally. Pulse excitation is selected as it can excite the structure in a wide frequency range contrary to conventional tone burst excitation. The results show that the proposed non-destructive method can be used in service for estimation of material and geometrical properties of structure in industrial applications.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.827-838
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• 2021

The dynamic displacement is considered to be an important indicator of structural safety, and becomes an indispensable part of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) system for high-speed railway bridges. This paper proposes an indirect strain based dynamic displacement reconstruction methodology for high-speed railway box girders. For the typical box girders under eccentric train load, the plane section assumption and elementary beam theory is no longer applicable due to the bend-torsion coupling effects. The monitored strain was decoupled into bend and torsion induced strain, pre-trained multi-output support vector regression (M-SVR) model was employed for such decoupling process considering the sensor layout cost and reconstruction accuracy. The decoupled strained based displacement could be reconstructed respectively using box girder plate element analysis and mode superposition principle. For the transformation modal matrix has a significant impact on the reconstructed displacement accuracy, the modal order would be optimized using particle swarm algorithm (PSO), aiming to minimize the ill conditioned degree of transformation modal matrix and the displacement reconstruction error. Numerical simulation and dynamic load testing results show that the reconstructed displacement was in good agreement with the simulated or measured results, which verifies the validity and accuracy of the algorithm proposed in this paper.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.587-599
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• 2021

The modified-ECOMAC approach to monitor and investigate health of structure in marine platforms was evaluated in this research. The material properties of structure were defined based on the real platform located in Persian Gulf. The nonlinear time-history analyses were undertaken using the marine natural waves. The modified-ECOMAC approach was designed to act as the solution of the best sensor placement according to structural dynamic behavior of structure. This novel method uses nonlinear time-history analysis results as an exact seismic response despite the common COMAC algorithms utilize the eigenvalue responses. The processes of modified-ECOMAC criteria were designed and developed by author of this paper as a toolbox of Matlab. The Results show that utilizing an efficient ECOMAC method in SHM process leads to detecting the critical weak points of sensitive marine platforms to make better decision about them. The statistical results indicate that considering modified ECOMAC based on seismic waves analysis has an acceptable accuracy on identify the sensor location. The average of statistical comparison of COMAC and ECOMAC via modal and integrated analysis, had a high MAE of 0.052 and RSME of 0.057 and small R2 of 0.504, so there is significant difference between them.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.557-569
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• 2022

Vibration-based structural health monitoring (SHM) is crucial for the dynamic maintenance of civil building structures to protect property security and the lives of the public. Analyzing these vibrations with modern artificial intelligence and deep learning (DL) methods is a new trend. This paper proposed an unsupervised deep learning method based on a convolutional autoencoder (CAE), which can overcome the limitations of conventional supervised deep learning. With the convolutional core applied to the DL network, the method can extract features self-adaptively and efficiently. The effectiveness of the method in detecting damage is then tested using a benchmark model. Thereafter, this method is used to detect damage and instant disaster events in a rubber bearing-isolated gymnasium structure. The results indicate that the method enables the CAE network to learn the intact vibrations, so as to distinguish between different damage states of the benchmark model, and the outcome meets the high-dimensional data distribution characteristics visualized by the t-SNE method. Besides, the CAE-based network trained with daily vibrations of the isolating layer in the gymnasium can precisely recover newly collected vibration and detect the occurrence of the ground motion. The proposed method is effective at identifying nonlinear variations in the dynamic responses and has the potential to be used for structural condition assessment and safety warning.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.475-484
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• 2022

The loss of cable tension for civil infrastructure reduces structural bearing capacity and causes harmful deformation of structures. Currently, most of the structural health monitoring (SHM) approaches for cables rely on contact transducers. This paper proposes a cable tension identification technology using percussion sound, which provides a fast determination of steel cable tension without physical contact between cables and sensors. Notably, inspired by the concept of tensioning strings for piano tuning, this proposed technology predicts cable tension value by deep learning assisted classification of "percussion" sound from tapping a steel cable. To simulate the non-linear mapping of human ears to sound and to better quantify the minor changes in the high-frequency bands of the sound spectrum generated by percussions, Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) were extracted as acoustic features to train the deep learning network. A convolutional neural network (CNN) with four convolutional layers and two global pooling layers was employed to identify the cable tension in a certain designed range. Moreover, theoretical and finite element methods (FEM) were conducted to prove the feasibility of the proposed technology. Finally, the identification performance of the proposed technology was experimentally investigated. Overall, results show that the proposed percussion-based technology has great potentials for estimating cable tension for in-situ structural safety assessment.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.107-127
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• 2022

Structural health monitoring (SHM) has been related to damage identification with either operational loads or other environmental loading playing a significant complimentary role in terms of structural safety. In this study, a non-parametric method of time frequency analysis on the measurement is used to address the time-frequency representation for modal parameter estimation and system damage identification of structure. The method employs the wavelet decomposition of dynamic data by using the modified complex Morlet wavelet with variable central frequency (MCMW+VCF). Through detail discussion on the selection of model parameter in wavelet analysis, the method is applied to study the dynamic response of both steel structure and reinforced concrete frame under white noise excitation as well as earthquake excitation from shaking table test. Application of the method to building earthquake response measurement is also examined. It is shown that by using the spectrogram generated from MCMW+VCF method, with suitable selected model parameter, one can clearly identify the time-varying modal frequency of the reinforced concrete structure under earthquake excitation. Discussions on the advantages and disadvantages of the method through field experiments are also presented.