• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.51 no.6
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• pp.697-712
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• 2024

In this paper, the dynamic flexural stiffness of concrete-filled steel tubular (CFST) members is investigated based on vibration modal testing and a Bayesian model updating procedure. To reflect the actual service states of CFST members, a 3-stage modal testing procedure is developed for 6 circular CFST beam-columns, in which the modal parameters of the specimens under varying axial load levels are extracted. In the model updating procedure, a Timoshenko beam element model is first established, in which the influence of shear deformation and rotational inertia are incorporated. Subsequently, a 2-round Bayesian model updating strategy is proposed to calculate the dynamic flexural stiffness of the specimens, which could effectively consider the influence of physical constraints in the updating process and achieve reasonably well results. Analysis of the updating results shows that with the increase of the axial load level, degradation of the flexural stiffness is significantly influenced by the load eccentricity. It shows that the cracking of the core concrete is the primary reason for the flexural stiffness degradation of CFST beam-columns. Finally, based on comparison with equations proposed by several design standards, the calculation methods for the dynamic flexural stiffness of CFST members is recommended.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.10 no.4_5
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• pp.375-391
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• 2012

This paper reports the structural health monitoring benchmark study results for the Canton Tower using Bayesian methods. In this study, output-only modal identification and finite element model updating are considered using a given set of structural acceleration measurements and the corresponding ambient conditions of 24 hours. In the first stage, the Bayesian spectral density approach is used for output-only modal identification with the acceleration time histories as the excitation to the tower is unknown. The modal parameters and the associated uncertainty can be estimated through Bayesian inference. Uncertainty quantification is important for determination of statistically significant change of the modal parameters and for weighting assignment in the subsequent stage of model updating. In the second stage, a Bayesian model updating approach is utilized to update the finite element model of the tower. The uncertain stiffness parameters can be obtained by minimizing an objective function that is a weighted sum of the square of the differences (residuals) between the identified modal parameters and the corresponding values of the model. The weightings distinguish the contribution of different residuals with different uncertain levels. They are obtained using the Bayesian spectral density approach in the first stage. Again, uncertainty of the stiffness parameters can be quantified with Bayesian inference. Finally, this Bayesian framework is applied to the 24-hour field measurements to investigate the variation of the modal and stiffness parameters under changing ambient conditions. Results show that the Bayesian framework successfully achieves the goal of the first task of this benchmark study.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.659-677
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• 2014

A Bayesian response surface updating procedure is applied in order to update the parameters of the covariance function of a random field for concrete properties based on a limited number of available measurements. Formulas as well as a numerical algorithm are presented in order to update the parameters of response surfaces using Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulations. The parameters of the covariance function are often based on some kind of expert judgment due the lack of sufficient measurement data. However, a Bayesian updating technique enables to estimate the parameters of the covariance function more rigorously and with less ambiguity. Prior information can be incorporated in the form of vague or informative priors. The proposed estimation procedure is evaluated through numerical simulations and compared to the commonly used least square method.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.81 no.1
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• pp.103-115
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• 2022

The prediction error variances for frequencies are usually considered as unknown in the Bayesian system identification process. However, the error variances for mode shapes are taken as known to reduce the dimension of an identification problem. The present study attempts to explore the effectiveness of Bayesian approach of model parameters updating using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique considering the prediction error variances for both the frequencies and mode shapes. To remove the ergodicity of Markov Chain, the posterior distribution is obtained by Gaussian Random walk over the proposal distribution. The prior distributions of prediction error variances of modal evidences are implemented through inverse gamma distribution to assess the effectiveness of estimation of posterior values of model parameters. The issue of incomplete data that makes the problem ill-conditioned and the associated singularity problem is prudently dealt in by adopting a regularization technique. The proposed approach is demonstrated numerically by considering an eight-storey frame model with both complete and incomplete modal data sets. Further, to study the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a comparative study with regard to accuracy and computational efficacy of the proposed approach is made with the Sequential Monte Carlo approach of model parameter updating.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.87 no.1
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• pp.1-18
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• 2023

The paper presents a Bayesian Finite element (FE) model updating methodology by utilizing modal data. The dynamic condensation technique is adopted in this work to reduce the full system model to a smaller model version such that the degrees of freedom (DOFs) in the reduced model correspond to the observed DOFs, which facilitates the model updating procedure without any mode-matching. The present work considers both the MPV and the covariance matrix of the modal parameters as the modal data. Besides, the modal data identified from multiple setups is considered for the model updating procedure, keeping in view of the realistic scenario of inability of limited number of sensors to measure the response of all the interested DOFs of a large structure. A relationship is established between the modal data and structural parameters based on the eigensystem equation through the introduction of additional uncertain parameters in the form of modal frequencies and partial mode shapes. A novel sampling strategy known as the Metropolis-within-Gibbs (MWG) sampler is proposed to sample from the posterior Probability Density Function (PDF). The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by considering both simulated and experimental examples.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.321-336
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• 2022

Model uncertainty is a key factor that could influence the accuracy and reliability of numerical model-based analysis. It is necessary to acquire an appropriate updating approach which could search and determine the realistic model parameter values from measurements. In this paper, the Bayesian model updating theory combined with the transitional Markov chain Monte Carlo (TMCMC) method and K-means cluster analysis is utilized in the updating of the structural model parameters. Kriging and polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) are employed to generate surrogate models to reduce the computational burden in TMCMC. The selected updating approaches are applied to three structural examples with different complexity, including a two-storey frame, a ten-storey frame, and the national stadium model. These models stand for the low-dimensional linear model, the high-dimensional linear model, and the nonlinear model, respectively. The performances of updating in these three models are assessed in terms of the prediction uncertainty, numerical efforts, and prior information. This study also investigates the updating scenarios using the analytical approach and surrogate models. The uncertainty quantification in the Bayesian approach is further discussed to verify the validity and accuracy of the surrogate models. Finally, the advantages and limitations of the surrogate model-based updating approaches are discussed for different structural complexity. The possibility of utilizing the boosting algorithm as an ensemble learning method for improving the surrogate models is also presented.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.935-956
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• 2015

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of steel towers has become a hot research topic. From the literature, it is impractical and impossible to develop a "general" method that can detect all kinds of damages for all types of structures. A practical method should make use of the characteristics of the type of structures and the kind of damages. This paper reports a feasibility study on the use of measured modal parameters for the detection of damaged braces of tower structures following the Bayesian probabilistic approach. A substructure-based structural model-updating scheme, which groups different parts of the target structure systematically and is specially designed for tower structures, is developed to identify the stiffness distributions of the target structure under the undamaged and possibly damaged conditions. By comparing the identified stiffness distributions, the damage locations and the corresponding damage extents can be detected. By following the Bayesian theory, the probability model of the uncertain parameters is derived. The most probable model of the steel tower can be obtained by maximizing the probability density function (PDF) of the model parameters. Experimental case studies were employed to verify the proposed method. The contributions of this paper are not only on the proposal of the substructure-based Bayesian model updating method but also on the verification of the proposed methodology through measured data from a scale model of transmission tower under laboratory conditions.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.435-448
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• 2018

This paper reports the development of a theoretically rigorous method for permanent way engineers to assess the condition of railway ballast under a concrete sleeper with the potential to be extended to a smart system for long-term health monitoring of railway ballast. Owing to the uncertainties induced by the problems of modeling error and measurement noise, the Bayesian approach was followed in the development. After the selection of the most plausible model class for describing the damage status of the rail-sleeper-ballast system, Bayesian model updating is adopted to calculate the posterior PDF of the ballast stiffness at various regions under the sleeper. An obvious drop in ballast stiffness at a region under the sleeper is an evidence of ballast damage. In model updating, the model that can minimize the discrepancy between the measured and model-predicted modal parameters can be considered as the most probable model for calculating the posterior PDF under the Bayesian framework. To address the problems of non-uniqueness and local minima in the model updating process, a two-stage hybrid optimization method was developed. The modified evolutionary algorithm was developed in the first stage to identify the important regions in the parameter space and resulting in a set of initial trials for deterministic optimization to locate all most probable models in the second stage. The proposed methodology was numerically and experimentally verified. Using the identified model, a series of comprehensive numerical case studies was carried out to investigate the effects of data quantity and quality on the results of ballast damage detection. Difficulties to be overcome before the proposed method can be extended to a long-term ballast monitoring system are discussed in the conclusion.

• IE interfaces
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.79-89
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• 1993

We develop a statistical model to describe nuclear power plant accidents and predict time to next accident of various levels. We adopt Bayesian approach to obtain posterior and predictive distributions for the time to next accident. We also derive an approximation method to solve many dimensional numerical integration problems that we often encounter in a Bayesian approach. We introduce Influence Diagrams in modeling, and parameter updating, thereby the dependency or independency among model parameters are clearly shown. Also Separable Updating Theorem is utilized to easily obtain the posterior distributions.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.61-81
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• 2023

This study presents an ensemble learning based Bayesian model updating approach for structural damage diagnosis. In the developed framework, the structure is initially decomposed into a set of substructures. The autoregressive moving average (ARMAX) model is established first for structural damage localization based structural motion equation. The wavelet packet decomposition is utilized to extract the damage-sensitive node energy in different frequency bands for constructing structural surrogate models. Four methods, including Kriging predictor (KRG), radial basis function neural network (RBFNN), support vector regression (SVR), and multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS), are selected as candidate structural surrogate models. These models are then resampled by bootstrapping and combined to obtain an ensemble model by probabilistic ensemble. Meanwhile, the maximum entropy principal is adopted to search for new design points for sample space updating, yielding a more robust ensemble model. Through the iterations, a framework of surrogate ensemble learning based model updating with high model construction efficiency and accuracy is proposed. The specificities of the method are discussed and investigated in a case study.