• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
• /
• 제6권4호
• /
• pp.317-346
• /
• 2019

Performance assessment of pavements proves useful, in terms of handling the ride quality, controlling the travel time of vehicles and adequate maintenance of pavements. Roughness profiles provide a good measure of the deteriorating condition of the pavement. For the accurate estimates of pavement roughness from dynamic vehicle responses, vehicle parameters should be known accurately. Information on vehicle parameters is uncertain, due to the wear and tear over time. Hence, condition monitoring of pavement requires the identification of pavement roughness along with vehicle parameters. The present study proposes a scheme which estimates the roughness profile of the pavement with the use of accurate estimates of vehicle parameters computed in parallel. Pavement model used in this study is a two-layer Euler-Bernoulli beam resting on a nonlinear Pasternak foundation. The asphalt topping of the pavement in the top layer is modeled as viscoelastic, and the base course bottom layer is modeled as elastic. The viscoelastic response of the top layer is modeled with the help of the Burgers model. The vehicle model considered in this study is a half car model, fitted with accelerometers at specified points. The identification of the coupled system of vehicle-pavement interaction employs a coupled scheme of an unbiased minimum variance estimator and an optimization scheme. The partitioning of observed noisy quantities to be used in the two schemes is investigated in detail before the analysis. The unbiased minimum variance estimator (MVE) make use of a linear state-space formulation including roughness, to overcome the linearization difficulties as in conventional nonlinear filters. MVE gives estimates for the unknown input and fed into the optimization scheme to yield estimates of vehicle parameters. The issue of ill-posedness of the problem is dealt with by introducing a regularization equivalent term in the objective function, specifically where a large number of parameters are to be estimated. Effect of different objective functions is also studied. The outcome of this research is an overall measure of pavement condition.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
• /
• 제21권6호
• /
• pp.513-525
• /
• 2020

Slopes stabilised with piles are seldom analysed considering uncertainties in the parameters of the pile-slope system. Reliability analysis of the pile-slope system quantifies the degree of uncertainties and evaluates the safety of the system. In the present study, the reliability analysis of a slope stabilised with piles is performed using the first-order reliability method (FORM) based on Hasofer-Lind approach. The implicit performance function associated with the factor of safety (FS) of the slope is approximated using the response surface method. The analyses are carried out considering the design matrices formulated based on both the 2^k factorial design augmented with a centre run (2^k fact-centred design) and face-centered cube design (FCD). The finite element method is used as the deterministic model to compute the FS of the pile-slope system. Results are compared with the results of the Monte Carlo simulation. It is observed that the optimum location of the row of piles is at the middle of the slope to achieve the maximum FS. The results show that the reliability of the system is not uniform for different pile configurations, even if the system deterministically satisfies the target factor of safety (FS_t) criterion. The FS_t should be selected judiciously as it is observed that the reliability of the system changes drastically with the FS_t level. The results of the 2^k fact-centred design and FCD are in good agreement with each other. The procedure of the FCD is computationally costly and hence the use of 2^k fact-centred design is recommended, provided the response of the system is sufficiently linear over the factorial space.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• 제25권6호
• /
• pp.751-764
• /
• 2020

Real-time monitoring of stiffness and strength in cement based system has received significant attention in past few decades owing to the development of advanced techniques. Also, use of environment friendly supplementary cementitious materials (SCM) in cement, though gaining huge interest, severely affect the strength gain especially in early ages. Continuous monitoring of strength- and stiffness- gain using an efficient technique will systematically facilitate to choose the suitable time of removal of formwork for structures made with SCM incorporated concrete. This paper presents a technique for monitoring the strength and stiffness evolution in hydrating fly ash blended cement systems using electro-mechanical impedance (EMI) based technique. It is important to observe that the slower pozzolanic reactivity of fly ash blended cement systems could be effectively tracked using the evolution of equivalent local stiffness of the hydrating medium. Strength prediction models are proposed for estimating the strength and stiffness of the fly ash cement system, where curing age (in terms of hours/days) and the percentage replacement of cement by fly ash are the parameters. Evaluation of strength as obtained from EMI characteristics is validated with the results from destructive compression test and also compared with the same obtained from commonly used ultrasonic wave velocity (UPV). Statistical error indices indicate that the EMI technique is capable of predicting the strength of fly ash blended cement system more accurate than that from UPV. Further, the correlations between stiffness- and strength- gain over the time of hydration are also established. From the study, it is found that EMI based method can be effectively used for monitoring of strength gain in the fly ash incorporated cement system during hardening.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• 제25권6호
• /
• pp.719-732
• /
• 2020

Real-time hybrid simulation (RTHS) which combines physical experiment with numerical simulation is an advanced method to investigate dynamic responses of structures subjected to earthquake excitation. The desired displacement computed from the numerical substructure is applied to the experimental substructure by a servo-hydraulic actuator in real time. However, the magnitude decay and phase delay resulted from the dynamics of the servo-hydraulic system affect the accuracy and stability of a RTHS. In this study, a robust stability analysis procedure for a general single-degree-of-freedom structure is proposed which considers the uncertainty of servo-hydraulic system dynamics. For discussion purposes, the experimental substructure is a portion of the entire structure in terms of a ratio of stiffness, mass, and damping, respectively. The dynamics of the servo-hydraulic system is represented by a multiplicative uncertainty model which is based on a nominal system and a weight function. The nominal system can be obtained by conducting system identification prior to the RTHS. A first-order weight function formulation is proposed which needs to cover the worst possible uncertainty envelope over the frequency range of interest. Then, the Nyquist plot of the perturbed system is adopted to determine the robust stability margin of the RTHS. In addition, three common delay compensation methods are applied to the RTHS loop to investigate the effect of delay compensation on the robust stability. Numerical simulation and experimental validation results indicate that the proposed procedure is able to obtain a robust stability margin in terms of mass, damping, and stiffness ratio which provides a simple and conservative approach to assess the stability of a RTHS before it is conducted.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
• /
• 제74권1호
• /
• pp.55-67
• /
• 2020

The common practice to predict the characteristic structural load effects (LEs) in long reference periods is to employ the extreme value theory (EVT) for building limit distributions. However, most applications ignore that LEs are driven by multiple loading events and thus do not have the identical distribution, a prerequisite for EVT. In this study, we propose the composite extreme value modeling approach using clustering to (a) cluster initial blended samples into finite identical distributed subsamples using the finite mixture model, expectation-maximization algorithm, and the Akaike information criterion; (b) combine limit distributions of subsamples into a composite prediction equation using the generalized Pareto distribution based on a joint threshold. The proposed approach was validated both through numerical examples with known solutions and engineering applications of bridge traffic LEs on a long-span bridge. The results indicate that a joint threshold largely benefits the composite extreme value modeling, many appropriate tail approaching models can be used, and the equation form is simply the sum of the weighted models. In numerical examples, the proposed approach using clustering generated accurate extrema prediction of any reference period compared with the known solutions, whereas the common practice of employing EVT without clustering on the mixture data showed large deviations. Real-world bridge traffic LEs are driven by multi-events and present multipeak distributions, and the proposed approach is more capable of capturing the tendency of tailed LEs than the conventional approach. The proposed approach is expected to have wide applications to general problems such as samples that are driven by multiple events and that do not have the identical distribution.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• 제25권1호
• /
• pp.65-80
• /
• 2020

In order to protect a structure over its full life cycle, a novel tuned mass damper (TMD), the so-called semi-active eddy current pendulum tuned mass damper (SAEC-PTMD), which can retune its frequency and damping ratio in real-time, is proposed in this study. The structural instantaneous frequency is identified through a Hilbert-Huang transformation (HHT), and the SAEC-PTMD pendulum is adjusted through an HHT-based control algorithm. The eddy current damping parameters are discussed, and the relationship between effective damping coefficients and air gaps is fitted through a polynomial function. The semi-active eddy current damping can be adjusted in real-time by adjusting the air gap based on the linear-quadratic-Gaussian (LQG)-based control algorithm. To verify the vibration control effect of the SAEC-PTMD, an idealized linear primary structure equipped with an SAEC-PTMD excited by harmonic excitations and near-fault pulse-like earthquake excitations is proposed as one of the two case studies. Under strong earthquakes, structures may go into the nonlinear state, while the Bouc-Wen model has a wild application in simulating the hysteretic characteristic. Therefore, in the other case study, a nonlinear primary structure based on the Bouc-Wen model is proposed. An optimal passive TMD is used for comparison and the detuning effect, which results from the cumulative damage to primary structures, is considered. The maximum and root-mean-square (RMS) values of structural acceleration and displacement time history response, structural acceleration, and displacement response spectra are used as evaluation indices. Power analyses for one earthquake excitation are presented as an example to further study the energy dissipation effect of an SAECPTMD. The results indicate that an SAEC-PTMD performs better than an optimized passive TMD, both before and after damage occurs to the primary structure.

• Wind and Structures
• /
• 제30권4호
• /
• pp.367-378
• /
• 2020

Two-dimensional Delayed Detached Eddy Simulation (DDES) was carried out to investigate the uniform flow over a twin-box bridge deck (TBBD) with various gap ratios of L/C=5.1%, 12.8%, 25.6%, 38.5%, 73.3% and 108.2% (L: the gap-width between two girders, C: the chord length of a single girder) at Reynolds number, Re=4×104. The aerodynamic coefficients of the prototype deck with gap ratio of 73.3% obtained from the present simulation were compared with the previous experimental and numerical data for different attack angles to validate the present numerical method. Particular attention is devoted to the fluctuating pressure distribution and forces, shear layer reattachment position, wake velocity and flow pattern in order to understand the effects of gap ratio on dynamic flow interaction with the twin-box bridge deck. The flow structure is sensitive to the gap, thus a change in L/C thus leads to single-side shedding regime at L/C≤25.6%, and co-shedding regime at L/C≥35.8% distinguished by drastic changes in flow structure and vortex shedding. The gap-ratio-dependent Strouhal number gradually increases from 0.12 to 0.27, though the domain frequencies of vortices shedding from two girders are identical. The mean and fluctuating pressure distributions is significantly influenced by the flow pattern, and thus the fluctuating lift force on two girders increases or decreases with increasing of L/C in the single-side shedding and co-shedding regime, respectively. In addition, the flow mechanisms for the variation in aerodynamic performance with respect to gap ratios are discussed in detail.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• 제26권3호
• /
• pp.277-290
• /
• 2020

Disasters, including earthquakes and landslides, have enormous economic and social losses besides their impact on environmental disruption. Iran, and particularly its Western part, is known as an earthquake susceptible area due to numerous strong ground motions. Studying ecological changes due to climate change can improve the public and expert sector's awareness and response to future disastrous events. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data and Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) technologies are appropriate tools for modeling and surface deformation modeling. This paper proposes an efficient approach to detect ground deformation changes using Sentinel-1A. The focal point of this research is to map the ground surface deformation modeling is presented using InSAR technology over Sarpol-e Zahab on 25^th November 2018 as a study case. For surface deformation modeling and detection of the ground movement due to earthquake SARPROZ in MATLAB programming language is used and discussed. Results show that there is a general ground movement due to the Sarpol-e Zahab earthquake between -7 millimeter to +18 millimeter in the study area. This research verified previous researches on the advanced image analysis techniques employed for mapping ground movement, where InSAR provides a reliable tool for assisting engineers and the decision-maker in choosing proper policies in a time of disasters. Based on the result, 574 out of 682 damaged buildings and infrastructures due to the 2017 Sarpol-e Zahab earthquake have moved from -2 to +17 mm due to the 2018 earthquake with a magnitude of 6.3 Richter. Results show that mountainous areas have suffered land subsidence, where urban areas had land uplift.

• Wind and Structures
• /
• 제4권3호
• /
• pp.177-196
• /
• 2001

At present the most popular turbulence models used for engineering solutions to flow problems are the $k-{\varepsilon}$ and Reynolds stress models. The shortcoming of these models based on the isotropic eddy viscosity concept and Reynolds averaging in flow fields of the type found in the field of Wind Engineering are well documented. In view of these shortcomings this paper presents the implementation of a non-linear model and its evaluation for flow around a building. Tests were undertaken using the classical bluff body shape, a surface mounted cube, with orientations both normal and skewed at $45^{\circ}$ to the incident wind. Full-scale investigations have been undertaken at the Silsoe Research Institute with a 6 m surface mounted cube and a fetch of roughness height equal to 0.01 m. All tests were originally undertaken for a number of turbulence models including the standard, RNG and MMK $k-{\varepsilon}$ models and the differential stress model. The sensitivity of the CFD results to a number of solver parameters was tested. The accuracy of the turbulence model used was deduced by comparison to the full-scale predicted roof and wake recirculation zone lengths. Mean values of the predicted pressure coefficients were used to further validate the turbulence models. Preliminary comparisons have also been made with available published experimental and large eddy simulation data. Initial investigations suggested that a suitable turbulence model should be able to model the anisotropy of turbulent flow such as the Reynolds stress model whilst maintaining the ease of use and computational stability of the two equations models. Therefore development work concentrated on non-linear quadratic and cubic expansions of the Boussinesq eddy viscosity assumption. Comparisons of these with models based on an isotropic assumption are presented along with comparisons with measured data.

• Earthquakes and Structures
• /
• 제8권4호
• /
• pp.859-887
• /
• 2015

Structural health monitoring (SHM) has gained in popularity in recent years since it can assess the performance and condition of instrumented structures in real time and provide valuable information to the asset's manager and owner. Operational modal analysis plays an important role in SHM and it involves the determination of natural frequencies, damping ratios and mode shapes of a constructed structure based on measured dynamic data. This paper presents the operational modal analysis and seismic response characterization of the Tsing Ma Suspension Bridge of 2,160 m long subjected to different earthquake events. Three kinds of events, i.e., short-distance, middle-distance and long-distance earthquakes are taken into account. A fast Bayesian modal identification method is used to carry out the operational modal analysis. The modal properties of the bridge are identified and compared by use of the field monitoring data acquired before and after the earthquake for each type of the events. Research emphasis is given on identifying the predominant modes of the seismic responses in the deck during short-distance, middle-distance and long-distance earthquakes, respectively, and characterizing the response pattern of various structural portions (deck, towers, main cables, etc.) under different types of earthquakes. Since the bridge is over 2,000 m long, the seismic wave would arrive at the tower/anchorage basements of the two side spans at different time instants. The behaviors of structural dynamic responses on the Tsing Yi side span and on the Ma Wan side span under each type of the earthquake events are compared. The results obtained from this study would be beneficial to the seismic design of future long-span bridges to be built around Hong Kong (e.g., the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge).