• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.223-236
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• 1999

The need to monitor and undertake remidial works on large structures has greatly increased in recent years due to the appearance of widespread faults in large structures such as bridges and buildings, etc, of 20 or more years of age. The health condition of structures must be monitored continuously to maintenance the structures. In order to do in-situ monitoring, the sensor is necessary to be embedded in the structures. Fiber optic sensors can be embedded in the structures to get the health information in the structures. The fiber sensor was constructed with $3{\times}3$ fiber couplers to sense the multi-point strains and failure instants. The 4 RC (reinforced concrete) beams were made to 2 of A type, 2 of B type beams. These beams were reinforced by the reinforcing bars, and were tested under the flexural loading. The behavior of the beams was simultaneously measured by the fiber optic sensors, electrical strain gages, and LVDT. The states of the beams were interpreted by these all signals. By these experiments, There were verified that the fiber optic sensors could measure the structural strains and failure instants of the RC beams, The fiber sensors were well operated until the failure of the beams. It was shown that the strains of the reinforcing steel bar can be used to monitor the health condition of the beams through the flexural test of RC beams. On the other words, the results were arrived that the two strains in the reinforcing bar measured at the same point can give the information of the structural health status. Also, the failure instants of beams were well detected from the fiber optic filtered signals.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.997-1018
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• 2015

Structural health monitoring along with damage detection and assessment of its severity level in non-accessible reinforced concrete members using piezoelectric materials becomes essential since engineers often face the problem of detecting hidden damage. In this study, the potential of the detection of flexural damage state in the lower part of the mid-span area of a simply supported reinforced concrete beam using piezoelectric sensors is analytically investigated. Two common severity levels of flexural damage are examined: (i) cracking of concrete that extends from the external lower fiber of concrete up to the steel reinforcement and (ii) yielding of reinforcing bars that occurs for higher levels of bending moment and after the flexural cracking. The purpose of this investigation is to apply finite element modeling using admittance based signature data to analyze its accuracy and to check the potential use of this technique to monitor structural damage in real-time. It has been indicated that damage detection capability greatly depends on the frequency selection rather than on the level of the harmonic excitation loading. This way, the excitation loading sequence can have a level low enough that the technique may be considered as applicable and effective for real structures. Further, it is concluded that the closest applied piezoelectric sensor to the flexural damage demonstrates higher overall sensitivity to structural damage in the entire frequency band for both damage states with respect to the other used sensors. However, the observed sensitivity of the other sensors becomes comparatively high in the peak values of the root mean square deviation index.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.185-201
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• 2022

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is used to provide reliable information about the structure's integrity in near realtime following extreme incidents such as earthquakes, considering the inevitable aging and degradation that occurs in operating environments. This paper experimentally investigates an integrated wireless sensor network (Wi-SN) based monitoring technique for damage detection in concrete structures. An effective SHM technique can be used to detect potential structural damage based on post-earthquake data. Two novel methods are proposed for damage detection in reinforced concrete (RC) building structures including: (i) Jerk Energy Method (JEM), which is based on time-domain analysis, and (ii) Modal Contributing Parameter (MCP), which is based on frequency-domain analysis. Wireless accelerometer sensors are installed at each story level to monitor the dynamic responses from the building structure. Prior knowledge of the initial state (immediately after construction) of the structure is not required in these methods. Proposed methods only use responses recorded during ambient vibration state (i.e., operational state) to estimate the damage index. Herein, the experimental studies serve as an illustration of the procedures. In particular, (i) a 3-story shear-type steel frame model is analyzed for several damage scenarios and (ii) 2-story RC scaled down (at 1/6th) building models, simulated and verified under experimental tests on a shaking table. As a result, in addition to the usual benefits like system adaptability, and cost-effectiveness, the proposed sensing system does not require a cluster of sensors. The spatial information in the real-time recorded data is used in global damage identification stage of SHM. Whereas in next stage of SHM, the damage is detected at the story level. Experimental results also show the efficiency and superior performance of the proposed measuring techniques.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.189-199
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• 2024

To properly extract the strain components under varying operational conditions is very important in bridge health monitoring. The abnormal sensor readings can be correctly identified and the expected operational performance of the bridge can be better understood if each strain components can be accurately quantified. In this study, strain components under varying load conditions, i.e., temperature variation and live-load variation are evaluated based on field strain measurements collected from a real concrete box-girder bridge. Temperature-induced strain is mainly regarded as the trend variation along with the ambient temperature, thus a smoothing technique based on the wavelet packet decomposition method is proposed to estimate the temperature-induced strain. However, how to effectively extract the vehicle-induced strain is always troublesome because conventional threshold setting-based methods cease to function: if the threshold is set too large, the minor response will be ignored, and if too small, noise will be introduced. Therefore, an autoencoder framework is proposed to evaluate the vehicle-induced strain. After the elimination of temperature and vehicle-induced strain, the left of which, defined as the model error, is used to assess the operational performance of the bridge. As empirical techniques fail to detect the degraded state of the structure, a clustering technique based on Gaussian Mixture Model is employed to identify the damage occurrence and the validity is verified in a simulation study.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.195-214
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• 2016

Monitoring of impact loads is a very important technique in the field of structural health monitoring (SHM). However, in most cases it is not possible to measure impact events directly, so they need to be reconstructed. Impact load reconstruction refers to the problem of estimating an input to a dynamic system when the system output and the impulse response function are usually known. Generally this leads to a so called ill-posed inverse problem. It is reasonable to use prior knowledge of the force in order to develop more suitable reconstruction strategies and to increase accuracy. An impact event is characterized by a short time duration and a spatial concentration. Moreover the force time history of an impact has a specific shape, which also can be taken into account. In this contribution these properties of the external force are employed to create a sample-force-dictionary and thus to transform the ill-posed problem into a sparse recovery task. The sparse solution is acquired by solving a minimization problem known as basis pursuit denoising (BPDN). The reconstruction approach shown here is capable to estimate simultaneously the magnitude of the impact and the impact location, with a minimum number of accelerometers. The possibility of reconstructing the impact based on a noisy output signal is first demonstrated with simulated measurements of a simple beam structure. Then an experimental investigation of a real beam is performed.

• 전자공학회논문지 IE
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• v.46 no.4
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• pp.66-72
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• 2009

In field of environments, the control and monitoring devices for sewage disposal facilities have been developed to overcome a problem of the water contamination according to industrialization and urbanization. In order to control and monitor the driving motor and the surroundings states of the sewage disposal facilities installed in local stations, this paper presents the design method of efficient module system interconnected by internal network with serial interface. It is expected that the proposed method in this paper is able to provide the more adaptive and flexible design technique for the specification of condition and factors needed in the fast-changed environment market.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.199-204
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• 1999

The continuing development of the sensors for the measurement of the safety of structures has been making a turning point in measuring and evaluating the larger civil structural system as well. However, there are still remaining problems to be solved for the extremely large structure because the natural damages of those structures are not so simple to be monitored for the reason of their locational and structural conditions. One of the most significant problems is that a number of cables which connect the measuring system to the analyzer are liable to distort actual data. This paper presents a new monitoring system for large structures by means of a local wireless communication technique which would eliminate the possibility of the distortion of data by noise in cables. This new monitoring system employs the wireless system and the software for data communication, along with the strain sensor and accelerometers which have been already used in the past. It makes it possible for the data, which have been chosen by the central controling system from the various sensors placed in the large civil structures, to be wirelessly delivered and then analyzed and evaluated by decision making system of the structures.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.179-200
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• 2022

This paper proposes a data-driven methodology for online early damage identification under changing environmental conditions. The proposed method relies on two data analysis methods: feature-based method and hybrid principal component analysis (PCA) and kernel PCA to separate damage from environmental influences. First, spectral sub-band features, namely, spectral sub-band centroids (SSCs) and log spectral sub-band energies (LSSEs), are proposed as damage-sensitive features to extract damage information from measured structural responses. Second, hybrid modeling by integrating PCA and kernel PCA is performed on the spectral sub-band feature matrix for data normalization to extract both linear and nonlinear features for nonlinear procedure monitoring. After feature normalization, suppressing environmental effects, the control charts (Hotelling T² and SPE statistics) is implemented to novelty detection and distinguish damage in structures. The hybrid PCA-KPCA technique is compared to KPCA by applying support vector machine (SVM) to evaluate the effectiveness of its performance in detecting damage. The proposed method is verified through numerical and full-scale studies (a Bridge Health Monitoring (BHM) Benchmark Problem and a cable-stayed bridge in China). The results demonstrate that the proposed method can detect the structural damage accurately and reduce false alarms by suppressing the effects and interference of environmental variations.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2004.04a
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• pp.373-380
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• 2004

This paper presents the feasibility of an impedance-based damage detection technique using piezoelectric (PZT) transducers for civil infrastructures such as steel bridges. The impedance-based damage detection method is based on monitoring the changes in the electrical impedance. Those changes in the electrical impedance are due to the electro-mechanical coupling property of the piezoelectric material and structure. An effective integrated structural health monitoring system must include a statistical process of damage detection that is automated and real time assessment of damage in the structure. Once measured, damage sensitive features from this impedance change can be statistically quantified for various damage cases. The results of the experimental study on three kinds of structural members show that cracks or loosened bolts/nuts near the PZT sensors may be effectively detected by monitoring the shifts of the resonant frequencies. The root mean square (RMS) deviations of impedance functions between before and after damages were also considered as a damage indicator. The subsequent statistical methods using the impedance signature of the PZT sensors were investigated.

• 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.