• 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.21 no.5
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• pp.591-600
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• 2018

The probabilistic characterization of wind field characteristics is a significant task for fatigue reliability assessment of long-span railway bridges in wind-prone regions. In consideration of the effect of wind direction, the stochastic properties of wind field should be represented by a bivariate statistical model of wind speed and direction. This paper presents the construction of the bivariate model of wind speed and direction at the site of a railway arch bridge by use of the long-term structural health monitoring (SHM) data. The wind characteristics are derived by analyzing the real-time wind monitoring data, such as the mean wind speed and direction, turbulence intensity, turbulence integral scale, and power spectral density. A sequential quadratic programming (SQP) algorithm-based finite mixture modeling method is proposed to formulate the joint distribution model of wind speed and direction. For the probability density function (PDF) of wind speed, a double-parameter Weibull distribution function is utilized, and a von Mises distribution function is applied to represent the PDF of wind direction. The SQP algorithm with multi-start points is used to estimate the parameters in the bivariate model, namely Weibull-von Mises mixture model. One-year wind monitoring data are selected to validate the effectiveness of the proposed modeling method. The optimal model is jointly evaluated by the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) and coefficient of determination, $R^2$. The obtained results indicate that the proposed SQP algorithm-based finite mixture modeling method can effectively establish the bivariate model of wind speed and direction. The established bivariate model of wind speed and direction will facilitate the wind-induced fatigue reliability assessment of long-span bridges.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.217-223
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• 2007

This paper introduces an active sensing node using radio-frequency (RF) telemetry. This device has brought the traditional impedance-based structural health monitoring (SHM) technique to a new paradigm. The RF active sensing node consists of a miniaturized impedance measuring device (AD5933), a microcontroller (ATmega128L), and a radio frequency (RF) transmitter (XBee). A macro-fiber composite (MFC) patch interrogates a host structure by using a self-sensing technique of the miniaturized impedance measuring device. All the process including structural interrogation, data acquisition, signal processing, and damage diagnostic is being performed at the sensor location by the microcontroller. The RF transmitter is used to communicate the current status of the host structure. The feasibility of the proposed SHM strategy is verified through an experimental study inspecting loose bolts in a bolt-jointed aluminum structure.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.97-119
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• 2013

This paper presents numerical and experimental results on the use of guided waves for structural health monitoring (SHM) of crack growth during a fatigue test in a thick steel plate used for civil engineering application. Numerical simulation, analytical modeling, and experimental tests are used to prove that piezoelectric wafer active sensor (PWAS) can perform active SHM using guided wave pitch-catch method and passive SHM using acoustic emission (AE). AE simulation was performed with the multi-physic FEM (MP-FEM) approach. The MP-FEM approach permits that the output variables to be expressed directly in electric terms while the two-ways electromechanical conversion is done internally in the MP-FEM formulation. The AE event was simulated as a pulse of defined duration and amplitude. The electrical signal measured at a PWAS receiver was simulated. Experimental tests were performed with PWAS transducers acting as passive receivers of AE signals. An AE source was simulated using 0.5-mm pencil lead breaks. The PWAS transducers were able to pick up AE signal with good strength. Subsequently, PWAS transducers and traditional AE transducer were applied to a 12.7-mm CT specimen subjected to accelerated fatigue testing. Active sensing in pitch catch mode on the CT specimen was applied between the PWAS transducers pairs. Damage indexes were calculated and correlated with actual crack growth. The paper finishes with conclusions and suggestions for further work.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.559-573
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• 2020

One of the powerful data management tools is Building Information Modeling (BIM) which operates through obtaining, recalling, sharing, sorting and sorting data and supplying a digital environment of them. Employing SHM, a BIM in monitoring systems, would be an efficient method to address their data management problems and consequently optimize the economic aspects of buildings. The recording of SHM data is an effective way for engineers, facility managers and owners which make the BIM dynamic through the provision of updated information regarding the occurring state and health of different sections of the building. On the other hand, digital transformation is a continuous challenge in construction. In a cloud-based BIM platform, environmental and localization data are integrated which shape the Internet-of-Things (IoT) method. In order to improve work productivity, living comfort, and entertainment, the IoT has been growingly utilized in several products (such as wearables, smart homes). However, investigations confronting the integration of these two technologies (BIM and IoT) remain inadequate and solely focus upon the automatic transmission of sensor information to BIM models. Therefore, in this composition, the use of BIM based on SHM and IOT is reviewed and the economic application is considered.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.119-137
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• 2009

Smart sensors densely distributed over structures can use their computational and wireless communication capabilities to provide rich information for structural health monitoring (SHM). Though smart sensor technology has seen substantial advances during recent years, implementation of smart sensors on full-scale structures has been limited. Hardware resources available on smart sensors restrict data acquisition capabilities; intrinsic to these wireless systems are packet loss, data synchronization errors, and relatively slow communication speeds. This paper addresses these issues under the hardware limitation by developing corresponding middleware services. The reliable communication service requires only a few acknowledgement packets to compensate for packet loss. The synchronized sensing service employs a resampling approach leaving the need for strict control of sensing timing. The data aggregation service makes use of application specific knowledge and distributed computing to suppress data transfer requirements. These middleware services are implemented on the Imote2 smart sensor platform, and their efficacy demonstrated experimentally.

• 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.

• Annual Conference of KIPS
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• 2005.05a
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• pp.1409-1412
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• 2005

무선 센서 네트워크는 교량 안전진단(Structural Health Monitoring, SHM)을 위한 효율성, 신뢰성 등의 특징들을 제공한다. 그러나 현재 교량 안전진단은 아날로그 센서를 이용하여 데이터를 수집하고, 유선망을 사용하여 관리프로그램으로 전송하고 있다. 본 논문에서는 무선망에서 동작하는 센서 네트워크를 이용하여 교량 및 노면을 모니터링하기 위한 안전진단 시스템을 구현하였다.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.339-355
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• 2015

Corrosion of prestressed concrete structures is one of the main challenges that engineers face today. In response to this national need, this paper presents the results of a long-term project that aims at developing a structural health monitoring (SHM) technology for the nondestructive evaluation of prestressed structures. In this paper, the use of permanently installed low profile piezoelectric transducers (PZT) is proposed in order to record the acoustic emissions (AE) along the length of the strand. The results of an accelerated corrosion test are presented and k-means clustering is applied via principal component analysis (PCA) of AE features to provide an accurate diagnosis of the strand health. The proposed approach shows good correlation between acoustic emissions features and strand failure. Moreover, a clustering technique for the identification of false alarms is proposed.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.37 no.5
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• pp.383-397
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• 2023

In the Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) system of civil engineering, data missing inevitably occurs during the data acquisition and transmission process, which brings great difficulties to data analysis and poses challenges to structural health monitoring. In this paper, Convolution Neural Network (CNN) is used to recover the nonstationary wind speed data missing randomly at sampling points. Given the technical constraints and financial implications, field monitoring data samples are often insufficient to train a deep learning model for the task at hand. Thus, simulation combined transfer learning strategy is proposed to address issues of overfitting and instability of the deep learning model caused by the paucity of training samples. According to a portion of target data samples, a substantial quantity of simulated data consistent with the characteristics of target data can be obtained by nonstationary wind-field simulation and are subsequently deployed for training an auxiliary CNN model. Afterwards, parameters of the pretrained auxiliary model are transferred to the target model as initial parameters, greatly enhancing training efficiency for the target task. Simulation synergy strategy effectively promotes the accuracy and stability of the target model to a great extent. Finally, the structural dynamic response analysis verifies the efficiency of the simulation synergy strategy.