• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
• /
• v.13 no.6
• /
• pp.13-23
• /
• 2012

While Category 1 and Category 2 bridges are intensively inspected and carefully managed, many small bridges that are not in the Category 1 and 2 are often forgotten until they decay in serious condition. Since many of these small bridges located in the populated city, failure of them would cause huge negative impact on the community. This paper focuses on the small size concrete bridges for timely repair and rehabilitation work for the effective operation and management. Test bed is developed to define the key parameters to forecast the long term performance of the bridges, mostly concrete box bridges. Key parameters suggested in this paper are cumulative fatigue due to repetitive heavy traffic loads and the acid attacks for concrete material deterioration. The cumulative fatigue is measured by the use of the mileage concept. For the long term data collection and inspection, stable and easy to use data collection system is installed as a test bed. The contribution of this research work is on the development of the test bed to define the key parameters of bridge deterioration.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.17 no.6
• /
• pp.859-880
• /
• 2016

This study aims to establish an effective methodology for the detection of instant damages occurred in cable-stayed bridges with the measurements of cable vibration and structural temperatures. A transfer coefficient for the daily temperature variation and another for the long-term temperature variation are firstly determined to eliminate the environmental temperature effects from the cable force variation. Several thresholds corresponding to different levels of exceedance probability are then obtained to decide four upper criteria and four lower criteria for damage detection. With these criteria, the monitoring data for three stay cables of Ai-Lan Bridge are analyzed and compared to verify the proposed damage detection methodology. The simulated results to consider various damage scenarios unambiguously indicate that the damages with cable force changes larger than ${\pm}1%$ can be confidently detected. As for the required time to detect damage, it is found that the cases with ${\pm}2%$ of cable force change can be discovered in no more than 6 hours and those with ${\pm}1.5%$ of cable force change can be identified in at most 9 hours. This methodology is also investigated for more lightly monitored cases where only the air temperature measurement is available. Under such circumstances, the damages with cable force changes larger than ${\pm}1.5%$ can be detected within 12 hours. Even though not exhaustively reflecting the environmental temperature effects on the cable force variation, both the effective temperature and the air temperature can be considered as valid indices to eliminate these effects at high and low monitoring costs.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.6 no.8
• /
• pp.939-951
• /
• 2010

A low-cost wireless sensor network (WSN) solution with highly expandable super and simple nodes was developed. The super node was designed as a sensing unit as well as a receiving terminal with low energy consumption. The simple node was designed to serve as a cheaper alternative for large-scale deployment. A 12-bit ADC inputs and DAC outputs were reserved for sensor boards to ease the sensing integration. Vibration and thermal field tests of the Chi-Lu Bridge were conducted to evaluate the WSN's performance. Integral acceleration, temperature and tilt sensing modules were constructed to simplify the task of long-term environmental monitoring on this bridge, while a star topology was used to avoid collisions and reduce power consumption. We showed that, given sufficient power and additional power amplifier, the WSN can successfully be active for more than 7 days and satisfy the half bridge 120-meter transmission requirement. The time and frequency responses of cables shocked by external force and temperature variations around cables in one day were recorded and analyzed. Finally, guidelines on power characterization of the WSN platform and selection of acceleration sensors for structural health monitoring applications were given.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
• /
• v.26 no.4
• /
• pp.20-29
• /
• 2022

The operational modal analysis (OMA) technique, which extracts the modal parameters of a structural system using ambient vibrations, has been actively developed as a field of structural health monitoring of cable-supported bridges. In this paper, the short and long-term modal parameters of a cable-stayed bridge were evaluated using the acceleration data obtained from the two ambient vibration tests (AVTs) and three years of continuous measurements. A total of 27 vertical modes and 1 lateral mode in the range 0.1 ~ 2.5 Hz were extracted from the high-resolution AVTs which were conducted in the 6th and 19th years after its completion. Existing OMA methods such as Peak-Picking (PP), Eigensystem Realization Algorithm with Data Correlation (ERADC), Frequency Domain Decomposition (FDD) and Time Domain Decomposition (TDD) were applied for modal parameters extraction, and it was confirmed that there was no significant difference between the applied methods. From the correlation analysis between long-term natural frequencies and environmental factors, it was confirmed that temperature change is the dominant factor influencing natural frequency fluctuations. It was revealed that the decreased natural frequencies of the bridge were not due to changes in structural performance and integrity, but to the environmental effects caused by the temperature difference between the two AVTs. In addition, when the TDD technique is applied, the accuracy of extracted mode shapes is improved by adding a proposed algorithm that normalizes the sequence so that the autocorrelations at zero lag equal 1.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.30 no.5
• /
• pp.521-535
• /
• 2022

Efficient management of deteriorating civil infrastructure is one of the most important research topics in many developed countries. In particular, the remote displacement measurement of bridges using linear variable differential transformers, global positioning systems, laser Doppler vibrometers, and computer vision technologies has been attempted extensively. This paper proposes a remote displacement measurement system using closed-circuit televisions (CCTVs) and a computer-vision-based method for in-situ bridge bearings having relatively large displacement due to temperature change in long term. The hardware of the system is composed of a reference target for displacement measurement, a CCTV to capture target images, a gateway to transmit images via a mobile network, and a central server to store and process transmitted images. The usage of CCTV capable of night vision capture and wireless data communication enable long-term 24-hour monitoring on wide range of bridge area. The computer vision algorithm to estimate displacement from the images involves image preprocessing for enhancing the circular features of the target, circular Hough transformation for detecting circles on the target in the whole field-of-view (FOV), and homography transformation for converting the movement of the target in the images into an actual expansion displacement. The simple target design and robust circle detection algorithm help to measure displacement using target images where the targets are far apart from each other. The proposed system is installed at the Tancheon Overpass located in Seoul, and field experiments are performed to evaluate the accuracy of circle detection and displacement measurements. The circle detection accuracy is evaluated using 28,542 images captured from 71 CCTVs installed at the testbed, and only 48 images (0.168%) fail to detect the circles on the target because of subpar imaging conditions. The accuracy of displacement measurement is evaluated using images captured for 17 days from three CCTVs; the average and root-mean-square errors are 0.10 and 0.131 mm, respectively, compared with a similar displacement measurement. The long-term operation of the system, as evaluated using 8-month data, shows high accuracy and stability of the proposed system.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.7 no.5
• /
• pp.349-363
• /
• 2011

To assess the performance of a structure requires the measurement of global and relative displacements at critical points across the structure. They should be obtained in real time and in all weather condition. A Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) could satisfy the last two requirements. The American Global Position System (GPS) provides long term acquisitions with sampling rates sufficient to track the displacement of long period structures. The accuracy is of the order of sub-centimetres. The steel building which hosts the authors' laboratory is the reference case-study within this paper. First a comparison of data collected by GPS sensor units with data recorded by tri-axial accelerometers is carried out when dynamic vibrations are induced in the structure by movements of the internal bridge-crane. The elaborations from the GPS position readings are then compared with the results obtained by a Finite Element (FE) numerical simulation. The purposes are: i) to realize a refinement of the structural parameters which characterize the building and ii) to outline a suitable way for processing GPS data toward structural monitoring.

• Steel and Composite Structures
• /
• v.29 no.4
• /
• pp.527-544
• /
• 2018

The paper presents the study on a change in modal parameters and structural stiffness of cable-stayed Fiberline Bridge made entirely of Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer (GFRP) composite used for 20 years in the fjord area of Kolding, Denmark. Due to this specific location the bridge structure was subjected to natural aging in harsh environmental conditions. The flexural properties of the pultruded GFRP profiles acquired from the analyzed footbridge in 1997 and 2012 were determined through three-point bending tests. It was found that the Young's modulus increased by approximately 9%. Moreover, the influence of the temperature on the storage and loss modulus of GFRP material acquired from the Fiberline Bridge was studied by the dynamic mechanical analysis. The good thermal stability in potential real temperatures was found. The natural vibration frequencies and mode shapes of the bridge for its original state were evaluated through the application of the Finite Element (FE) method. The initial FE model was created using the real geometrical and material data obtained from both the design data and flexural test results performed in 1997 for the intact composite GFRP material. Full scale experimental investigations of the free-decay response under human jumping for the experimental state were carried out applying accelerometers. Seven natural frequencies, corresponding mode shapes and damping ratios were identified. The numerical and experimental results were compared. Based on the difference in the fundamental natural frequency it was again confirmed that the structural stiffness of the bridge increased by about 9% after 20 years of service life. Data collected from this study were used to validate the assumed FE model. It can be concluded that the updated FE model accurately reproduces the dynamic behavior of the bridge and can be used as a proper baseline model for the long-term monitoring to evaluate the overall structural response under service loads. The obtained results provided a relevant data for the structural health monitoring of all-GFRP bridge.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
• /
• v.10 no.6 s.52
• /
• pp.115-123
• /
• 2006

This paper presents long-term dynamic characteristics of a cable-stayed bridge where installed SHM (Structural Health Monitoring) system. Modal parameters such as natural frequencies and mode shapes are identified by modal analysis using three dimensional finite element model. The developed baseline model has a good correlation with measured natural frequencies identified from field ambient vibrations. By statistical data processing between measured natural frequencies and temperatures, it is demonstrated that the natural frequency is in linearly inverse proportion to the temperature. The estimation of temperature effects against frequency variations is performed. Mode shapes are identified from the TDD (Time Domain Decomposition) technique for ambient vibration measurements. Finally, these results demonstrate that the TDD method can apply to identify modal parameters of a cable-stayed bridge.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.25 no.5
• /
• pp.593-604
• /
• 2020

Temperature may have more significant influences on structural responses than operational loads or structural damage. Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of temperature distributions has great significance for proper design and maintenance of bridges. In this study, the temperature distribution of the steel box girder is systematically investigated based on the structural health monitoring system (SHMS) of the Sutong Cable-stayed Bridge. Specifically, the characteristics of the temperature and temperature difference between different measurement points are studied based on field temperature measurements. Accordingly, the probability density distributions of the temperature and temperature difference are calculated statistically, which are further described by the general formulas. The results indicate that: (1) the temperature and temperature difference exhibit distinct seasonal characteristics and strong periodicity, and the temperature and temperature difference among different measurement points are strongly correlated, respectively; (2) the probability density of the temperature difference distribution presents strong non-Gaussian characteristics; (3) the probability density function of temperature can be described by the weighted sum of four Normal distributions. Meanwhile, the temperature difference can be described by the weighted sum of Weibull distribution and Normal distribution.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.9 no.2
• /
• pp.145-164
• /
• 2012

In this paper, solar-powered, multi-scale, vibration-impedance sensor node on Imote2 platform is presented for hybrid structural health monitoring (SHM) in cable-stayed bridge. In order to achieve the objective, the following approaches are proposed. Firstly, vibration- and impedance-based hybrid SHM methods are briefly described. Secondly, the multi-scale vibration and impedance sensor node on Imote2-platform is presented on the design of hardware components and embedded software for vibration- and impedance-based SHM. In this approach, a solar-powered energy harvesting is implemented for autonomous operation of the smart sensor nodes. Finally, the feasibility and practicality of the smart sensor-based SHM system is evaluated on a full-scale cable-stayed bridge, Hwamyung Bridge in Korea. Successful level of wireless communication and solar-power supply for smart sensor nodes are verified. Also, vibration and impedance responses measured from the target bridge which experiences various weather conditions are examined for the robust long-term monitoring capability of the smart sensor system.