• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 한국전산구조공학회 2006년도 정기 학술대회 논문집
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• pp.225-231
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• 2006

The purpose of this study is to develop a promising hybrid structural health monitoring system for structural joints. For this propose, the combined use of vibration-based techniques and electro-mechanical impedance technique is employed. For the verification of the proposed health monitoring scheme, a series of damage scenarios are designed to simulate various situations at which the connection joints can experience during their service life. The obtained experimental results, modal parameters and electro-magnetic impedance signatures, are carefully analyzed to recognize the connecting states and the target damage locations. From the analysis. it is shown that the proposed hybrid health monitoring system is successful for acquiring global and local damage information on the structural joints.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• 제19권12호
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• pp.265-271
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• 2018

This paper presents a method for detecting damage to a structure at low cost using its impedance. The impedance technique is a typical method to detect local damage for structural health monitoring. This is a common technique for estimating damage by monitoring the electro-mechanical admittance signal of the structure. To apply this technique, an expensive impedance analyzer is generally used. On the other hand, it is necessary to develop a low-cost variant to effectively disseminate the technique. In this study, a method based on the transfer impedance using a function generator and digital multimeter, which are generally used in the laboratory instead of an impedance analyzer, was developed. That is, this technique estimates the damage by comparing the damage index using the amplitude ratio of the output voltage measured in the healthy and damaged state. A transfer impedance test was carried out on a steel specimen. By comparing the damage index, the presence of damage could be assessed reasonably. This study is a basic investigation of an impedance-based low-cost damage detection method that can be used effectively for structural health monitoring if supplemented with future research to estimate the damage location and severity.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제15권2호
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• pp.283-297
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• 2015

Jacket-type offshore structures are always exposed to severe environmental conditions such as salt, high speed of current, wave, and wind compared with other onshore structures. In spite of the importance of maintaining the structural integrity for an offshore structure, there are few cases to apply a structural health monitoring (SHM) system in practice. The impedance-based SHM is a kind of local SHM techniques and to date, numerous techniques and algorithms have been proposed for local SHM of real-scale structures. However, it still requires a significant challenge for practical applications to compensate unknown environmental effects and to extract only damage features from impedance signals. In this study, the impedance-based SHM was carried out on a 1/20-scaled model of an Uldolmok current power plant structure in Korea under changes in temperature and transverse loadings. Principal component analysis (PCA)-based approach was applied with a conventional damage index to eliminate environmental changes by removing principal components sensitive to them. Experimental results showed that the proposed approach is an effective tool for long-term SHM under significant environmental changes.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• 제13권1호
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• pp.1-10
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• 2018

Wide-area monitoring of tree-related high impedance fault (THIF) efficiently contributes to increase reliability of large-scaled network, since the failure to early location of them may results in critical lines tripping and consequently large blackouts. In the first place, this wide-area monitoring of THIF requires managing the placement of sensors across large power grid network according to THIF detection objective. For this purpose, current paper presents a framework in which sensors are distributed according to a predetermined risk map. The proposed risk map determines the possibility of THIF occurrence on every branch in a power network, based on electrical conductivity of trees and their positions to power lines which extracted from spectral data. The obtained possibility value can be considered as a weight coefficient assigned to each branch in sensor placement problem. The next step after sensors deployment is to on-line monitor based on moving data window. In this on-line process, the received data window is evaluated for obtaining a correlation between low frequency and high frequency components of signal. If obtained correlation follows a specified pattern, received signal is considered as a THIF. Thereafter, if several faulted section candidates are found by deployed sensors, the most likely location is chosen from the list of candidates based on predetermined THIF risk map.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제5권1호
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• pp.81-94
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• 2009

A vibration-impedance-based monitoring method is proposed to predict the loss of prestress forces in prestressed concrete (PSC) girder bridges. Firstly, a global damage alarming algorithm using the change in frequency responses is formulated to detect the occurrence of damage in PSC girders. Secondly, a local damage detection algorithm using the change in electro-mechanical impedance features is selected to identify the prestress-loss in tendon and anchoring members. Thirdly, a prestress-loss prediction algorithm using the change in natural frequencies is selected to estimate the extent of prestress-loss in PSC girders. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed method is experimentally evaluated on a scaled PSC girder model for which acceleration responses and electro-mechanical impedances were measured for several damage scenarios of prestress-loss.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제6권5_6호
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• pp.689-709
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• 2010

In this paper, a low cost, low power but multifunctional wireless sensor node is presented for the impedance-based SHM using piezoelectric sensors. Firstly, a miniaturized impedance measuring chip device is utilized for low cost and low power structural excitation/sensing. Then, structural damage detection/sensor self-diagnosis algorithms are embedded on the on-board microcontroller. This sensor node uses the power harvested from the solar energy to measure and analyze the impedance data. Simultaneously it monitors temperature on the structure near the piezoelectric sensor and battery power consumption. The wireless sensor node is based on the TinyOS platform for operation, and users can take MATLAB$^{(R)}$ interface for the control of the sensor node through serial communication. In order to validate the performance of this multifunctional wireless impedance sensor node, a series of experimental studies have been carried out for detecting loose bolts and crack damages on lab-scale steel structural members as well as on real steel bridge and building structures. It has been found that the proposed sensor nodes can be effectively used for local wireless health monitoring of structural components and for constructing a low-cost and multifunctional SHM system as "place and forget" wireless sensors.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• 제2권4호
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• pp.319-338
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• 2015

The electro-mechanical impedance (EMI) technique makes use of surface-bonded lead zirconate titanate (PZT) patches as impedance transducers measuring impedance variations monitored on host structural components. The present experimental work further evaluate an alternative to the conventional EMI technique which performs measurements of the variations in the output voltage of PZT transducers rather than computing electromechanical impedance (or admittance) itself. This paper further evaluates a variant of the EMI approach presented in a previous work of the present authors, suitable, for low-cost concrete structures monitoring applications making use of a credit card-sized Raspberry Pi single board computer as core hardware unit. This monitoring approach is also deployed by introducing a new damage identification index based on the ratio between the area of the 2-D error ellipse of specific probability of EMI-based measurements containment over that of the 2-D error circle of equivalent probability. Experimental results of damages occurring in concrete cubic and beam specimens are investigated under increasing loading conditions. Results illustrate that the proposed technique is an efficient approach for identification and early detection of damage in concrete structures.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 한국전산구조공학회 2008년도 정기 학술대회
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• pp.197-202
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• 2008

In this paper, a hybrid vibration-impedance approaches is newly proposed to detect the occurrence of damage, the location of damage, and extent of damage in steel plate-girder bridges. The hybrid scheme mainly consists of three sequential phases: 1) to alarm the occurrence of damage, 2) to classify the alarmed damage, and 3) to estimate the classified damage in detail. Damage types of interest include flexural stiffness-loss in girder and bolts-loose in supports. In the first phase, the global occurrence of damage is alarmed by monitoring changes in acceleration features. In the second phase, the alarmed damage is classified into subsystems by recognizing patterns of impedance features. In the final phase, the location and the extent of damage are estimated by using modal strain energy-based damage index method and root mean square deviation method. The feasibility of the proposed system is evaluated on a laboratory-scaled steel plate-girder bridge model for which hybrid vibration-impedance signatures were measured for several damage scenarios.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• 제25권4호
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• pp.59-65
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• 2011

In structural health monitoring (SHM) using electro-mechanical impedance signatures, it is a critical issue for extremely large structures to extract the best damage diagnosis results, while minimizing unknown environmental effects, including temperature, humidity, and acoustic vibration. If the impedance signatures fluctuate because of these factors, these fluctuations should be eliminated because they might hide the characteristics of the host structural damages. This paper presents a long-term SHM technique under an unknown noisy environment for tidal current power plant structures. The obtained impedance signatures contained significant variations during the measurements, especially in the audio frequency range. To eliminate these variations, a continuous principal component analysis was applied, and the results were compared with the conventional approach using the RMSD (Root Mean Square Deviation) and CC (Cross-correlation Coefficient) damage indices. Finally, it was found that this approach could be effectively used for long-term SHM in noisy environments.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제6권5_6호
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• pp.661-673
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• 2010

This paper presents recent developments in an extremely compact, wireless impedance sensor node (the WID3, $\underline{W}$ireless $\underline{I}$mpedance $\underline{D}$evice) for use in high-frequency impedance-based structural health monitoring (SHM), sensor diagnostics and validation, and low-frequency (< ~1 kHz) vibration data acquisition. The WID3 is equipped with an impedance chip that can resolve measurements up to 100 kHz, a frequency range ideal for many SHM applications. An integrated set of multiplexers allows the end user to monitor seven piezoelectric sensors from a single sensor node. The WID3 combines on-board processing using a microcontroller, data storage using flash memory, wireless communications capabilities, and a series of internal and external triggering options into a single package to realize a truly comprehensive, self-contained wireless active-sensor node for SHM applications. Furthermore, we recently extended the capability of this device by implementing low-frequency analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters so that the same device can measure structural vibration data. The compact sensor node collects relatively low-frequency acceleration measurements to estimate natural frequencies and operational deflection shapes, as well as relatively high-frequency impedance measurements to detect structural damage. Experimental results with application to SHM, sensor diagnostics and low-frequency vibration data acquisition are presented.