• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.373-384
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• 2007

For structural health monitoring (SHM) of civil infrastructures, displacement is a good descriptor of the structural behavior under all the potential disturbances. However, it is not easy to measure displacement of civil infrastructures, since the conventional sensors need a reference point, and inaccessibility to the reference point is sometimes caused by the geographic conditions, such as a highway or river under a bridge, which makes installation of measuring devices time-consuming and costly, if not impossible. To resolve this issue, a visionbased real-time displacement measurement system using digital image processing techniques is developed. The effectiveness of the proposed system was verified by comparing the load carrying capacities of a steel-plate girder bridge obtained from the conventional sensor and the present system. Further, to simultaneously measure multiple points, a synchronized vision-based system is developed using master/slave system with wireless data communication. For the purpose of verification, the measured displacement by a synchronized vision-based system was compared with the data measured by conventional contact-type sensors, linear variable differential transformers (LVDT) from a laboratory test.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.637-662
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• 2013

The Jiangyin Bridge is a suspension bridge with a main span of 1385 m over the Yangtze River in Jiangsu Province, China. Being the first bridge with a main span exceeding 1 km in Chinese mainland, it had been instrumented with a structural health monitoring (SHM) system when completed in 1999. After operation for several years, it was found with malfunction in sensors and data acquisition units, and insufficient sensors to provide necessary information for structural health evaluation. This study reports the SHM system upgrade project on the Jiangyin Bridge. Although implementations of SHM system have been reported worldwide, few studies are available on the upgrade of SHM system so far. Recognizing this, the upgrade of original SHM system for the bridge is first discussed in detail. Especially, lessons learned from the original SHM system are applied to the design of upgraded SHM system right away. Then, performance assessment of the bridge, including: (i) characterization of temperature profiles and effects; (ii) recognition of wind characteristics and effects; and (iii) identification of modal properties, is carried out by making use of the long-term monitoring data obtained from the upgraded SHM system. Emphasis is placed on the verification of design assumptions and prediction of bridge behavior or extreme responses. The results may provide the baseline for structural health evaluation.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.197-205
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• 2017

The dynamic performance of railway bridges under high-speed trains draws the attention of bridge engineers. The vibration issue for long-span bridges under high-speed trains is still not well understood due to lack of validations through structural health monitoring (SHM) data. This paper investigates the correlation between bridge acceleration and train speed based on structural dynamics theory and SHM system from three foci. Firstly, the calculated formula of acceleration response under a series of moving load is deduced for the situation that train length is near the length of the bridge span, the correlation between train speed and acceleration amplitude is analyzed. Secondly, the correlation scatterplots of the speed-acceleration is presented and discussed based on the transverse and vertical acceleration response data of Dashengguan Yangtze River Bridge SHM system. Thirdly, the warning indexes of the bridge performance for correlation scatterplots of speed-acceleration are established. The main conclusions are: (1) The resonance between trains and the bridge is unlikely to happen for long-span bridge, but a multimodal correlation curve between train speed and acceleration amplitude exists after the resonance speed; (2) Based on SHM data, multimodal correlation scatterplots of speed-acceleration exist and they have similar trends with the calculated formula; (3) An envelope line of polylines can be used as early warning indicators of the changes of bridge performance due to the changes of slope of envelope line and peak speed of amplitude. This work also gives several suggestions which lay a foundation for the better design, maintenance and long-term monitoring of a long-span high-speed bridge.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.607-616
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• 2019

The video deflectometer based on digital image correlation is a non-contacting optical measurement method which has become a useful tool for characterization of the vertical deflections of large structures. In this study, a novel imaging model has been established which considers the variations of pitch angles in the full image. The new model allows deflection measurement at a wide working distance with high accuracy. A monocular video deflectometer has been accordingly developed with an inclination sensor, which facilitates dynamic determination of the orientations and rotation of the optical axis of the camera. This layout has advantages over the video deflectometers based on theodolites with respect to convenience. Experiments have been presented to show the accuracy of the new imaging model and the performance of the monocular video deflectometer in outdoor applications. Finally, this equipment has been applied to the measurement of the vertical deflection of Yingwuzhou Yangtze River Bridge in real time at a distance of hundreds of meters. The results show good agreement with the embedded GPS outputs.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.33-46
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• 2012

To reduce the vibration of cable-stayed bridges, conventional magnetorheological (MR) damper control system (CMRDS), with separate power supply, sensors and controllers, is widely investigated. In this paper, to improve the reliability and performance of the control system, one adaptive MR damper control system (AMRDS) consisting of MR damper and piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH) is proposed. According to piezoelectric effect, PEH can produce energy for powering MR damper. The energy is proportional to the product of the cable displacement and velocity. Due to the damping force changing with the energy, the new system can be adjustable to reduce the cable vibration. Compared with CMRDS, the new system is structurally simplified, replacing external sensor, power supply and controller with PEH. In the paper, taking the N26 cable of Shandong Binzhou Yellow River Bridge as example, the design method for the whole AMRDS is given, and simple formulas for PEH are derived. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive control system, the performance is compared with active control case and simple Bang-Bang semi-active control case. It is shown that AMRDS is better than simple Bang-Bang semi-active control case, and still needed to be improved in comparison with active control case.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.279-293
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• 2019

To ensure high quality data being used for data mining or feature extraction in the bridge structural health monitoring (SHM) system, a practical sensor fault diagnosis methodology has been developed based on the similarity of symmetric structure responses. First, the similarity of symmetric response is discussed using field monitoring data from different sensor types. All the sensors are initially paired and sensor faults are then detected pair by pair to achieve the multi-fault diagnosis of sensor systems. To resolve the coupling response issue between structural damage and sensor fault, the similarity for the target zone (where the studied sensor pair is located) is assessed to determine whether the localized structural damage or sensor fault results in the dissimilarity of the studied sensor pair. If the suspected sensor pair is detected with at least one sensor being faulty, field test could be implemented to support the regression analysis based on the monitoring and field test data for sensor fault isolation and reconstruction. Finally, a case study is adopted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. As a result, Dasarathy's information fusion model is adopted for multi-sensor information fusion. Euclidean distance is selected as the index to assess the similarity. In conclusion, the proposed method is practical for actual engineering which ensures the reliability of further analysis based on monitoring data.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.359-371
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• 2019

As part of a structural health monitoring system, the relative geometric relationship between a ship and bridge has been recognized as important for bridge authorities and ship owners to avoid ship-bridge collision. This study proposes a novel computer vision method for the real-time geometric parameter identification of moving ships based on a single shot multibox detector (SSD) by using transfer learning techniques and monocular vision. The identification framework consists of ship detection (coarse scale) and geometric parameter calculation (fine scale) modules. For the ship detection, the SSD, which is a deep learning algorithm, was employed and fine-tuned by ship image samples downloaded from the Internet to obtain the rectangle regions of interest in the coarse scale. Subsequently, for the geometric parameter calculation, an accurate ship contour is created using morphological operations within the saturation channel in hue, saturation, and value color space. Furthermore, a local coordinate system was constructed using projective geometry transformation to calculate the geometric parameters of ships, such as width, length, height, localization, and velocity. The application of the proposed method to in situ video images, obtained from cameras set on the girder of the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge above the shipping channel, confirmed the efficiency, accuracy, and effectiveness of the proposed method.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.26 no.6
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• pp.781-796
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• 2020

Prediction of total sediment load is essential in an extensive range of problems such as the design of the dead volume of dams, design of stable channels, sediment transport in the rivers, calculation of bridge piers degradation, prediction of sand and gravel mining effects on river-bed equilibrium, determination of the environmental impacts and dredging necessities. This paper is aimed to investigate and predict the total sediment load of the Wadi Arbaat in Eastern Sudan. The study was estimated the sediment load by separate total sediment load into bedload and Suspended Load (SL), independently. Although the sediment records are not sufficient to construct the discharge-sediment yield relationship and Sediment Rating Curve (SRC), the total sediment loads were predicted based on the discharge and Suspended Sediment Concentration (SSC). The turbidity data NTU in water quality has been used for prediction of the SSC in the estimation of suspended Sediment Yield (SY) transport of Wadi Arbaat. The sediment curves can be used for the estimation of the suspended SYs from the watershed area. The amount of information available for Khor Arbaat case study on sediment is poor data. However, the total sediment load is essential for the optimal control of the sediment transport on Khor Arbaat sediment and the protection of the dams on the upper gate area. The results show that the proposed model is found to be considered adequate to predict the total sediment load.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.105-118
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• 2024

In order to realize tiny bridge crack discovery by UAV-based machine vision, a novel method combining deep learning and tensor voting is proposed. Firstly, the grid images of crack are detected and descripted based on SE-ResNet50 to generate feature points. Then, the probability significance map of crack image is calculated by tensor voting with feature points, which can define the direction and region of crack. Further, the crack detection anchor box is formed by non-maximum suppression from the probability significance map, which can improve the robustness of tiny crack detection. Finally, a case study is carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in the Xiangjiang-River bridge inspection. Compared with the original tensor voting algorithm, the proposed method has higher accuracy in the situation of only 1-2 pixels width crack and the existence of edge blur, crack discontinuity, which is suitable for UAV-based bridge crack discovery.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.55 no.10
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• pp.737-748
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• 2022

Due to the lack of flood data, the water engineering practice calculates the design flood using rainfall frequency analysis and rainfall-runoff model. However, the rainfall frequency analysis for arbitrary duration does not reflect the regional characteristics of the duration and amount of storm event. This study proposed a practical method to calculate the design flood in a watershed considering the characteristics of storm event, based on the bivariate rainfall frequency analysis. After extracting independent storm events for the Pyeongchang River basin and the upper Namhangang River basin, we performed the bivariate rainfall frequency analysis to determine the design storm events of various return periods, and calculated the design floods using the HEC-1 model. We compared the design floods based on the bivariate rainfall frequency analysis (DF_BRFA) with those estimated by the flood frequency analysis (DF_FFA), and those estimated by the HEC-1 with the univariate rainfall frequency analysis (DF_URFA). In the case of the Pyeongchang River basin, except for the 100-year flood, the average error of the DF_BRFA was 11.6%, which was the closest to the DF_FFA. In the case of the Namhangang River basin, the average error of the DF_BRFA was about 10%, which was the most similar to the DF_FFA. As the return period increased, the DF_URFA was calculated to be much larger than the DF_FFA, whereas the BRFA produced smaller average error in the design flood than the URFA. When the proposed method is used to calculate design flood in an ungauged watershed, it is expected that the estimated design flood might be close to the actual DF_FFA. Thus, the design of the hydrological structures and water resource plans can be carried out economically and reasonably.