• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.6 no.5_6
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• pp.641-659
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• 2010

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) gradually becomes a technique for ensuring the health and safety of civil infrastructures and is also an important approach for the research of the damage accumulation and disaster evolving characteristics of civil infrastructures. It is attracting prodigious research interests and the active development interests of scientists and engineers because a great number of civil infrastructures are planned and built every year in mainland China. In a SHM system the sheer number of accompanying wires, fiber optic cables, and other physical transmission medium is usually prohibitive, particularly for such structures as offshore platforms and long-span structures. Fortunately, with recent advances in technologies in sensing, wireless communication, and micro electro mechanical systems (MEMS), wireless sensor technique has been developing rapidly and is being used gradually in the SHM of civil engineering structures. In this paper, some recent advances in the research, development, and implementation of wireless sensors for the SHM of civil infrastructures in mainland China, especially in Dalian University of Technology (DUT) and Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), are introduced. Firstly, a kind of wireless digital acceleration sensors for structural global monitoring is designed and validated in an offshore structure model. Secondly, wireless inclination sensor systems based on Frequency-hopping techniques are developed and applied successfully to swing monitoring of large-scale hook structures. Thirdly, wireless acquisition systems integrating with different sensing materials, such as Polyvinylidene Fluoride(PVDF), strain gauge, piezoresistive stress/strain sensors fabricated by using the nickel powder-filled cement-based composite, are proposed for structural local monitoring, and validating the characteristics of the above materials. Finally, solutions to the key problem of finite energy for wireless sensors networks are discussed, with future works also being introduced, for example, the wireless sensor networks powered by corrosion signal for corrosion monitoring and rapid diagnosis for large structures.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.166-171
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• 2010

Wired monitoring systems have been used for damage detection and dynamic analysis of large structures(bridges, dams, plants, etc.). However, the real-world applications still remain limited, mainly due to time and cost issues inherent to wired systems. In recent years, an increasing number of researchers have adopted WSN(wireless sensor network) technologies to the field of SHM(structural health monitoring). Accurate time synchronization is most critical for the wireless approach to be feasible for SHM purpose, along with sufficient wireless bandwidth and highly precise measuring resolution. To satisfy technical criteria stated above, a wireless vibration monitoring system that uses high-precision MEMS(micro-electro-mechanical system) sensors and A/D convertor is discussed in detail. It was found experimentally that the level of time synchronization fell within $200\;{\mu}sec$.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.6 no.5_6
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• pp.711-730
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• 2010

This study presents the design of autonomous smart sensor nodes for damage monitoring of tendons and girders in prestressed concrete (PSC) bridges. To achieve the objective, the following approaches are implemented. Firstly, acceleration-based and impedance-based smart sensor nodes are designed for global and local structural health monitoring (SHM). Secondly, global and local SHM methods which are suitable for damage monitoring of tendons and girders in PSC bridges are selected to alarm damage occurrence, to locate damage and to estimate severity of damage. Thirdly, an autonomous SHM scheme is designed for PSC bridges by implementing the selected SHM methods. Operation logics of the SHM methods are programmed based on the concept of the decentralized sensor network. Finally, the performance of the proposed system is experimentally evaluated for a lab-scaled PSC girder model for which a set of damage scenarios are experimentally monitored by the developed smart sensor nodes.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.1019-1039
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• 2015

Shanghai Tower is a composite structure building with a height of 632 m. In order to verify the structural properties and behaviors in construction and operation, a structural health monitoring project was conducted by Tongji University. The monitoring system includes sensor system, data acquisition system and a monitoring software system. Focusing on the health monitoring in construction, this paper introduced the monitoring parameters in construction, the data acquisition strategy and an integration structural health monitoring (SHM) software. The integration software - Structural Monitoring/ Analysis/ Evaluation System (SMAE) is designed based on integration and modular design idea, which includes on-line data acquisition, finite elements and dynamic property analysis functions. With the integration and modular design idea, this SHM system can realize the data exchange and results comparison from on-site monitoring and FEM effectively. The analysis of the monitoring data collected during the process of construction shows that the system works stably, realize data acquirement and analysis effectively, and also provides measured basis for understanding the structural state of the construction. Meanwhile, references are provided for the future automates construction monitoring and implementation of high-rise building structures.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.369-379
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• 2009

The sudden collapse of Interstate 35 Bridge in Minneapolis gave a wake-up call to US municipalities to re-evaluate aging bridges. In this situation, structural health monitoring (SHM) technology can provide the essential help needed for monitoring and maintaining the nation's infrastructure. Monitoring long span bridges such as cable-stayed bridges effectively requires the use of a large number of sensors. In this article, we introduce a probabilistic approach to identify optimal locations of sensors to enhance damage detection. Probability distribution functions are established using an artificial neural network trained using a priori knowledge of damage locations. The optimal number of sensors is identified using multi-objective optimization that simultaneously considers information entropy and sensor cost-objective functions. Luling Bridge, a cable-stayed bridge over the Mississippi River, is selected as a case study to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.359-366
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• 2018

Social infrastructure facilities that have been under construction since the country's high-growth period are undergoing rapid aging, and safety assessments of large structures such as bridge tunnels, which can be directly linked to large-scale casualties in the event of an accident, are necessary. Wireless smart sensor networks that improve SHM(Structural Health Monitoring) based on existing wire sensors are difficult to construct economical and efficient system due to short signal reach. The LPWAN, Low Power Wide Area Network, is becoming popular with the Internet of Things and it is possible to construct economical and efficient SHM by applying it to structural health monitoring. This study examines the applicability of LoRa LPWAN to structural health monitoring and proposes a channel usage pre-planning based LoRa network operation method that can efficiently utilize bandwidth while resolving conflicts between channels caused by using license - exempt communication band.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.109-124
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• 2020

Benefiting from the massive monitoring data collected by the Structural health monitoring (SHM) system, scholars can grasp the complex environmental effects and structural state during structure operation. However, the monitoring data is often missing due to sensor faults and other reasons. It is necessary to study the recovery method of missing monitoring data. Taking the structural temperature monitoring data of Nanjing Dashengguan Yangtze River Bridge as an example, the long short-term memory (LSTM) network-based recovery method for missing structural temperature data is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the prediction results of temperature data using LSTM network, support vector machine (SVM), and wavelet neural network (WNN) are compared to verify the accuracy advantage of LSTM network in predicting time series data (such as structural temperature). Secondly, the application of LSTM network in the recovery of missing structural temperature data is discussed in detail. The results show that: the LSTM network can effectively recover the missing structural temperature data; incorporating more intact sensor data as input will further improve the recovery effect of missing data; selecting the sensor data which has a higher correlation coefficient with the data we want to recover as the input can achieve higher accuracy.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.350-358
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• 2009

In a wireless sensor network (WSN) setting, this paper presents a distributed decision-making framework and illustrates its application in an online structural health monitoring (SHM) system. The objective is to recover a damage severity vector, which identifies, localizes, and quantifies damages in a structure, via distributive and collaborative decision-making among wireless sensors. Observing the fact that damages are generally scarce in a structure, this paper develops a nonlinear 0-norm minimization formulation to recover the sparse damage severity vector, then relaxes it to a linear and distributively tractable one. An optimal algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and a heuristic distributed linear programming (DLP) algorithm are proposed to estimate the damage severity vector distributively. By limiting sensors to exchange information among neighboring sensors, the distributed decision-making algorithms reduce communication costs, thus alleviate the channel interference and prolong the network lifetime. Simulation results in monitoring a steel frame structure prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

• Proceedings of the KSR Conference
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• 2008.11b
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• pp.1545-1561
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• 2008

Among all transportations, railway transports have been promisingly offering excellent energy conservation and travelling time. Inevitably, they become a main role in not only transport goods but also passengers. With leap in development of technology, trains have tremendously enhanced their services in terms of speed, accessibility and comfort. However, the safety and ride quality have become a main issue as the train speed increased. The higher speeds have led the structural dynamics and health must be monitored from time to time to ensure that they are in good condition to provide reliable ride. Among all monitoring systems, the structural health monitoring (SHM) systems are imperative important due to its capability of in-situ monitoring and inherently reduce the maintenance frequencies and the huge associated cost. In this paper, SHM systems and the related non-destructive test and evaluation methods were discussed. The types of damages related to train vehicles as well as the damage hot spots are also included in this paper.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.835-851
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• 2015

This paper presents theoretical and experimental evaluation of the structural health monitoring (SHM) capability of piezoelectric wafer active sensors (PWAS) at elevated temperatures. This is important because the technologies for structural sensing and monitoring need to account for the thermal effect and compensate for it. Permanently installed PWAS transducers have been One of the extensively employed sensor technologies for in-situ continuous SHM. In this paper, the electro-mechanical impedance spectroscopy (EMIS) method has been utilized as a dynamic descriptor of PWAS behavior and as a high frequency standing wave local modal technique. Another SHM technology utilizes PWAS as far-field transient transducers to excite and detect guided waves propagating through the structure. This paper first presents how the EMIS method is used to qualify and quantify circular PWAS resonators in an increasing temperature environment up to 230 deg C. The piezoelectric material degradation with temperature was investigated and trends of variation with temperature were deduced from experimental measurements. These effects were introduced in a wave propagation simulation software called Wave Form Revealer (WFR). The thermal effects on the substrate material were also considered. Thus, the changes in the propagating guided wave signal at various temperatures could be simulated. The paper ends with summary and conclusions followed by suggestions for further work.