• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.307-314
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• 2015

In this paper, the embedding type novel liquid metal strain gauge was developed for measuring the deformation of wind turbine blades. In general, the conventional methods for the SHM have many disadvantages such as frequency distortion in FBG sensors, the low gauge factor and mechanical failures in strain gauges and extremely sophisticated filtering in AE sensors. However, the liquid metal filled in a pre-confined micro channel shows dramatic characteristics such as high sensitivity, flexibility and robustnes! s to environment. To adopt such a high feasibility of the liquid metal in flexible sensor applications, the EGaIn was introduced to make flexible liquid metal strain gauges for the SHM. A micro channeled flexible film fabricated by the several MEMS processes and the PDMS replication was filled with EGaIn and wire-connected. Lots of experiments were conducted to investigate the performance of the developed strain gauges and verify the feasibility to the actual wind turbine blades health monitoring.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.134-144
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• 2007

In this study, a smart sensor unit is developed by using the smart sensor technology that is being rapidly developed in recent years for structural health monitoring system, and its performance is evaluated through various experiments, and also, damage detection experiment is performed on a model structure. This paper as the first half of this study contains the development and performance evaluation of the smart sensor. In the latter half of this study, structure damage detection experiment is performed for the application of verified smart sensor unit into structural health monitoring, and it is compared with a wire measurement system. The smart sensor is developed by using high-power wireless modem, MEMS Sensor and AVR microcontroller, and an embedded program is also developed for the control and operation of the sensor unit. To verify the performance of the smart sensor, many experiments are performed for sensitivity and resolution analysis tests, data acquisition by using cantilever beam and shaker, and on-site application using actual bridge. As a result, the smart sensor proves to be satisfactory in its performance.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.687-701
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• 2022

Inevitable response loss under complex operational conditions significantly affects the integrity and quality of measured data, leading the structural health monitoring (SHM) ineffective. To remedy the impact of data loss, a common way is to transfer the recorded response of available measure point to where the data loss occurred by establishing the response mapping from measured data. However, the current research has yet addressed the structural condition changes afterward and response mapping learning from a small sample. So, this paper proposes a novel data driven structural response reconstruction method based on a sophisticated designed generating adversarial network (UAGAN). Advanced deep learning techniques including U-shaped dense blocks, self-attention and a customized loss function are specialized and embedded in UAGAN to improve the universal and representative features extraction and generalized responses mapping establishment. In numerical validation, UAGAN efficiently and accurately captures the distinguished features of structural response from only 40 training samples of the intact structure. Besides, the established response mapping is universal, which effectively reconstructs responses of the structure suffered up to 10% random stiffness reduction or structural damage. In the experimental validation, UAGAN is trained with ambient response and applied to reconstruct response measured under earthquake. The reconstruction losses of response in the time and frequency domains reached 16% and 17%, that is better than the previous research, demonstrating the leading performance of the sophisticated designed network. In addition, the identified modal parameters from reconstructed and the corresponding true responses are highly consistent indicates that the proposed UAGAN is very potential to be applied to practical civil engineering.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.927-942
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• 2014

Structural displacement is an important indicator for assessing structural safety. For structural displacement monitoring, vision-based displacement measurement systems have been widely developed; however, most systems estimate only 1 or 2-DOF translational displacement. To monitor the 6-DOF structural displacement with high accuracy, a vision-based displacement measurement system with a uniquely designed marker is proposed in this paper. The system is composed of a uniquely designed marker and a camera with a zooming capability, and relative translational and rotational displacement between the marker and the camera is estimated by finding a homography transformation. The novel marker is designed to make the system robust to measurement noise based on a sensitivity analysis of the conventional marker and it has been verified through Monte Carlo simulation results. The performance of the displacement estimation has been verified through two kinds of experimental tests; using a shaking table and a motorized stage. The results show that the system estimates the structural 6-DOF displacement, especially the translational displacement in Z-axis, with high accuracy in real time and is robust to measurement noise.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.185-192
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• 2011

A CFRP (Carbon Fiber-Reinforced Plastic) strengthening method being widely used to increase the load-carrying capacity of structures is very suitable for existing bridge structures. However, not only flexure and shear failures but also debonding failure might be additionally occured in reinforced concrete(RC) beams strengthened with the CFRP plates. The CFRP debonding failure would cause a brittle fracture of the beam. Therefore, health monitoring for the CFRP bonding condition is strongly required. In this study, a feasibility of the impedance-based damage detection method using PZT sensors was investigated through a series of experimental studies for realtime structural health monitoring(SHM) for the CFRP laminated concrete structures.

• 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.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.587-614
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• 2014

In recent years the interest in online monitoring of lightweight structures with ultrasonic guided waves is steadily growing. Especially the aircraft industry is a driving force in the development of structural health monitoring (SHM) systems. In order to optimally design SHM systems powerful and efficient numerical simulation tools to predict the behaviour of ultrasonic elastic waves in thin-walled structures are required. It has been shown that in real industrial applications, such as airplane wings or fuselages, conventional linear and quadratic pure displacement finite elements commonly used to model ultrasonic elastic waves quickly reach their limits. The required mesh density, to obtain good quality solutions, results in enormous computational costs when solving the wave propagation problem in the time domain. To resolve this problem different possibilities are available. Analytical methods and higher order finite element method approaches (HO-FEM), like p-FEM, spectral elements, spectral analysis and isogeometric analysis, are among them. Although analytical approaches offer fast and accurate results, they are limited to rather simple geometries. On the other hand, the application of higher order finite element schemes is a computationally demanding task. The drawbacks of both methods can be circumvented if regions of complex geometry are modelled using a HO-FEM approach while the response of the remaining structure is computed utilizing an analytical approach. The objective of the paper is to present an efficient method to couple different HO-FEM schemes with an analytical description of an undisturbed region. Using this hybrid formulation the numerical effort can be drastically reduced. The functionality of the proposed scheme is demonstrated by studying the propagation of ultrasonic guided waves in plates, excited by a piezoelectric patch actuator. The actuator is modelled utilizing higher order coupled field finite elements, whereas the homogenous, isotropic plate is described analytically. The results of this "semi-analytical" approach highlight the opportunities to reduce the numerical effort if closed-form solutions are partially available.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.81-88
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• 2021

Structural health monitoring (SHM) systems have attracted considerable interest owing to the frequent earthquakes over the last decade. Smart concrete is a technology that can analyze the state of structures based on their electro-mechanical behavior. On the other hand, most research on the self-sensing response of smart concrete generally investigated the electro-mechanical behavior of smart concrete under a static loading rate, even though the loading rate under an earthquake would be much faster than the static rate. Thus, this study evaluated the electro-mechanical behavior of smart ultra-high-performance concrete (S-UHPC) at three different loading rates (1, 4, and 8 mm/min) using a Universal Testing Machine (UTM). The stress-sensitive coefficient (SC) at the maximum compressive strength of S-UHPC was -0.140 %/MPa based on a loading rate of 1 mm/min but decreased by 42.8% and 72.7% as the loading rate was increased to 4 and 8 mm/min, respectively. Although the sensing capability of S-UHPC decreased with increased load speed due to the reduced deformation of conductive materials and increased microcrack, it was available for SHM systems for earthquake detection in structures.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.135-150
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• 2015

Large concrete structures are prone to cracks and damages over time from human usage, weathers, and other environmental attacks such as flood, earthquakes, and hurricanes. The health of the concrete structures should be monitored regularly to ensure safety. A reliable method of real time communications can facilitate more frequent structural health monitoring (SHM) updates from hard to reach positions, enabling crack detections of embedded concrete structures as they occur to avoid catastrophic failures. By implementing an unconventional mode of communication that utilizes guided stress waves traveling along the concrete structure itself, we may be able to free structural health monitoring from costly (re-)installation of communication wires. In stress-wave communications, piezoelectric transducers can act as actuators and sensors to send and receive modulated signals carrying concrete status information. The new generation of lead zirconate titanate (PZT) based smart aggregates cause multipath propagation in the homogeneous concrete channel, which presents both an opportunity and a challenge for multiple sensors communication. We propose a time reversal based pulse position modulation (TR-PPM) communication for stress wave communication within the concrete structure to combat multipath channel dispersion. Experimental results demonstrate successful transmission and recovery of TR-PPM using stress waves. Compared with PPM, we can achieve higher data rate and longer link distance via TR-PPM. Furthermore, TR-PPM remains effective under low signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio. This work also lays the foundation for implementing multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) stress wave communication networks in concrete channels.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.741-749
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• 2018

Structural health monitoring (SHM) systems are necessary to achieve smart predictive maintenance and repair planning as well as they lead to a safe operation of mechanical structures. In the context of vibration-based SHM the measured structural responses are employed to draw conclusions about the structural integrity. This usually leads to a mathematically illposed inverse problem which needs regularization. The restriction of the solution set of this inverse problem by using prior information about the damage properties is advisable to obtain meaningful solutions. Compared to the undamaged state typically only a few local stiffness changes occur while the other areas remain unchanged. This change can be described by a sparse damage parameter vector. Such a sparse vector can be identified by employing $L_1$-regularization techniques. This paper presents a novel framework for damage parameter identification by combining sparse solution techniques with an Extended Kalman Filter. In order to ensure sparsity of the damage parameter vector the measurement equation is expanded by an additional nonlinear $L_1$-minimizing observation. This fictive measurement equation accomplishes stability of the Extended Kalman Filter and leads to a sparse estimation. For verification, a proof-of-concept example on a quadratic aluminum plate is presented.