• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.2 no.1
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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.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.539-558
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• 2012

The diagnosis of bridge serviceability is carried out by a combination of in-situ visual inspection, static and dynamic loading tests and analyses. Structural health monitoring (SHM) using information technology and sensors is increasingly being used for providing a better estimate of structural performance characteristics rather than above traditional methods. Because the mechanical behavior of bridges with various kinds of damage can not be made clear, it is very difficult to estimate both the damage mode and degree of damage of existing bridges. In this paper, the sensitivity of both static and dynamic behaviors of bridges are studied as a measure of damage assessment through experiments on model bridges induced with some specified artificial damages. And, a method of damage assessment of bridges based on those behaviors is discussed in detail. Finally, based on the results, a possible application for structural health monitoring systems for existing bridges is also discussed.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2007.04a
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• pp.651-656
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• 2007

Changes in measured structural responses induced by a damage could be significantly smaller than those by environmental effects such as temperature and temperature gradients. It is highly desirable to develop a methodology to distinguish the changes due to the structural damage from those by the environmental variations. In this study, a novel method to extract the damage-induced deflection under temperature variations is presented using the outlier analysis on the deflections obtained using the modal flexibility matrices. The main idea is that temperature change in a bridge would produce global increase or decrease in deflections over the whole bridge while structural damages may cause local variations in deflections near the damage locations. Hence, the correlation between the deflection measurements may show high abnormality near the damage locations. A series of laboratory tests were carried out on a bridge model with a steel box-girder for 14 days. It has been found that the damage existence assessment and localization can carried out for a case with relatively small damage under the temperature variations

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.57-68
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• 2023

Bridge hangers, such as those in suspension and cable-stayed bridges, suffer from cumulative fatigue damage caused by dynamic loads (e.g., cyclic traffic and wind loads) in their service condition. Thus, the identification of damage to hangers is important in preserving the service life of the bridge structure. This study develops a new method for condition assessment of bridge hangers. The tension force of the bridge and the damages in the element level can be identified using the Bayesian optimization method. To improve the number of observed data, the additional mass method is combined the Bayesian optimization method. Numerical studies are presented to verify the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method. The influence of different acquisition functions, which include expected improvement (EI), probability-of-improvement (PI), lower confidence bound (LCB), and expected improvement per second (EIPC), on the identification of damage to the bridge hanger is studied. Results show that the errors identified by the EI acquisition function are smaller than those identified by the other acquisition functions. The identification of the damage to the bridge hanger with various types of boundary conditions and different levels of measurement noise are also studied. Results show that both the severity of the damage and the tension force can be identified via the proposed method, thereby verifying the robustness of the proposed method. Compared to the genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and nonlinear least-square method (NLS), the Bayesian optimization (BO) performs best in identifying the structural damage and tension force.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.849-868
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• 2014

An indirect approach is explored for structural health bridge monitoring allowing for wide, yet cost-effective, bridge stock coverage. The detection capability of the approach is tested in a laboratory setting for three different reversible proxy types of damage scenarios: changes in the support conditions (rotational restraint), additional damping, and an added mass at the midspan. A set of frequency features is used in conjunction with a support vector machine classifier on data measured from a passing vehicle at the wheel and suspension levels, and directly from the bridge structure for comparison. For each type of damage, four levels of severity were explored. The results show that for each damage type, the classification accuracy based on data measured from the passing vehicle is, on average, as good as or better than the classification accuracy based on data measured from the bridge. Classification accuracy showed a steady trend for low (1-1.75 m/s) and high vehicle speeds (2-2.75 m/s), with a decrease of about 7% for the latter. These results show promise towards a highly mobile structural health bridge monitoring system for wide and cost-effective bridge stock coverage.

• 한국방재학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2008.02a
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• pp.317-320
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• 2008

Between traffic-induced vibration of a bridge and fatigue damage of its attached structures are very closely related. But any evaluation and design method considering the fatigue damage is not established yet. As an experimental method of evaluation of the fatigue durability, a method based on cumulative damage using a stress range histogram has been often used. However, to use the method, the fatigue durability of unmeasured points could not be evaluated. Then, in this paper, dynamic analysis of a sign frame on a bridge is carried out based on the vibration data of the bridge. And model optimization was performed for good agreement between measured responses and computed responses. As a result, we could get stress range histograms and calculate fatigue durability of unmeasured points.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.575-589
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• 2019

The main focus of this study is to numerically investigate the influence of strong earthquake and tsunami-induced wave impact on the response and behavior of a cable-stayed steel bridge with large caisson foundations, by assuming that the earthquake and the tsunami come from the same fault motion. For this purpose, a series of numerical simulations were carried out. First of all, the tsunami-induced flow speed, direction and tsunami height were determined by conducting a two-dimensional (2D) tsunami propagation analysis in a large area, and then these parameters obtained from tsunami propagation analysis were employed in a detailed three-dimensional (3D) fluid analysis to obtain tsunami-induced wave impact force. Furthermore, a fiber model, which is commonly used in the seismic analysis of steel bridge structures, was adopted considering material and geometric nonlinearity. The residual stresses induced by the earthquake were applied into the numerical model during the following finite element analysis as the initial stress state, in which the acquired tsunami forces were input to a whole bridge system. Based on the analytical results, it can be seen that the foundation sliding was not observed although the caisson foundation came floating slightly, and the damage arising during the earthquake did not expand when the tsunami-induced wave impact is applied to the steel bridge. It is concluded that the influence of tsunami-induced wave force is relatively small for such steel bridge with large caisson foundations. Besides, a numerical procedure is proposed for quantitatively estimating the accumulative damage induced by the earthquake and the tsunami in the whole bridge system with large caisson foundations.

• Journal of Korean Society of Steel Construction
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• v.11 no.1 s.38
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• pp.79-88
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• 1999

Damages of a steel box girder bridge are detected using neural networks. Damage detection using neural networks has increasing momentum in structural engineering. It is a new effort to overcome the limitations of the conventional analytical approaches and applied to the damage detection of a steel box-girder bridge. Data sets for training neural networks are obtained from the acceleration response of the bridge under moving load. Finite element model is first defined and damages of 5, 10, 15 and 20% are assumed in the model. Not only the trained damages but untrained damages are detected in the assessment stage. The untrained damages can be detected with acceptable errors. Because the number of damaged locations are limited to a few parts, more researches are needed to put this technique into practice.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.40 no.5
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• pp.719-743
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• 2011

A hybrid damage monitoring scheme using parallel acceleration-impedance approaches is proposed to detect girder damage and support damage in steel plate-girder bridges which are under ambient train-induced excitations. The hybrid scheme consists of three phases: global and local damage monitoring in parallel manner, damage occurrence alarming and local damage identification, and detailed damage estimation. In the first phase, damage occurrence in a structure is globally monitored by changes in vibration features and, at the same moment, damage occurrence in local critical members is monitored by changes in impedance features. In the second phase, the occurrence of damage is alarmed and the type of damage is locally identified by recognizing patterns of vibration and impedance features. In the final phase, the location and severity of the locally identified damage are estimated by using modal strain energy-based damage index methods. The feasibility of the proposed scheme is evaluated on a steel plate-girder bridge model which was experimentally tested under model train-induced excitations. Acceleration responses and electro-mechanical impedance signatures were measured for several damage scenarios of girder damage and support damage.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.86 no.6
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• pp.715-730
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• 2023

Broad studies have addressed the issue of structural element damage identification, however, rubber bearing, as a key component of load transmission between the superstructure and substructure, is essential to the operational safety of a bridge, which should be paid more attention to its health condition. However, regarding the limitations of the traditional bearing damage detection methods as well as few studies have been conducted on this topic, in this paper, inspired by the model updating-based structural damage identification, a two-stage bearing damage identification method has been proposed. In the first stage, we deduce a novel bearing damage localization indicator, called element relative MSE, to accurately determine the bearing damage location. In the second one, the prior knowledge of bearing damage localization is combined with sailfish optimization (SFO) to perform the bearing damage estimation. In order to validate the feasibility, a numerical example of a 5-span continuous beam is introduced, also the noise robustness has been investigated. Meanwhile, the effectiveness and engineering applicability are further verified based on an experimental simply supported beam and actual engineering of the I-40 Bridge. The obtained results are good, which indicate that the proposed method is not only suitable for simple structures but also can accurately locate the bearing damage site and identify its severity for complex structure. To summarize, the proposed method provides a good guideline for the issue of bridge bearing detection, which could be used to reduce the difficulty of the traditional bearing failure detection approach, further saving labor costs and economic expenses.