• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.47-65
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• 2015

A novel finite element (FE) model updating method based on multi-resolution analysis (MRA) is proposed. The true stiffness of the FE model is considered as the superposition of two pieces of stiffness information of different resolutions: the pre-defined stiffness information and updating stiffness information. While the resolution of former is solely decided by the meshing density of the FE model, the resolution of latter is decided by the limited information obtained from the experiment. The latter resolution is considerably lower than the former. Second generation wavelet is adopted to describe the updating stiffness information in the framework of MRA. This updating stiffness in MRA is realized at low level of resolution, therefore, needs less number of updating parameters. The efficiency of the optimization process is thus enhanced. The proposed method is suitable for the identification of multiple irregular cracks and performs well in capturing the global features of the structural damage. After the global features are identified, a refinement process proposed in the paper can be carried out to improve the performance of the MRA of the updating information. The effectiveness of the method is verified by numerical simulations of a box girder and the experiment of a three-span continues pre-stressed concrete bridge. It is shown that the proposed method corresponds well to the global features of the structural damage and is stable against the perturbation of modal parameters and small variations of the damage.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.49 no.2
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• pp.183-202
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• 2014

A new method of multiple damage detection in beam like structures is introduced. The mode shapes of both healthy and damaged structures are used in damage detection process (DDP). Multiple Damage Localization Index Based on Mode Shapes (MDLIBMS) is presented as a criterion in detecting damaged elements. A finite element modeling of structures is used to calculate the mode shapes parameters. The main advantages of the proposed method are its simplicity, flexibility on the number of elements and so the accuracy of the damage(s) position(s), sensitivity to small damage extend, capability in prediction of required number of mode shapes and low sensitivity to noisy data. In fact, because of differential and comparative form of MDLIBMS, using noise polluted data doesn't have major effect on the results. This makes the proposed method a powerful one in damage detection according to measured mode shape data. Because of its flexibility, damage detection process in multi span bridge girders with non-prismatic sections can be done by this method. Numerical simulations used to demonstrate these advantages.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.607-618
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• 2017

In this research, a newly developed nature-inspired optimization method, the Lion Pride Optimization algorithm (LPOA), is utilized for optimal design of composite steel box girder bridges. A composite box girder bridge is one of the common types of bridges used for medium spans due to their economic, aesthetic, and structural benefits. The aim of the present optimization procedure is to provide a feasible set of design variables in order to minimize the weight of the steel trapezoidal box girders. The solution space is delimited by different types of design constraints specified by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. Additionally, the optimal solution obtained by LPOA is compared to the results of other well-established meta-heuristic algorithms, namely Gray Wolf Optimization (GWO), Ant Lion Optimizer (ALO) and the results of former researches. By this comparison the capability of the LPOA in optimal design of composite steel box girder bridges is demonstrated.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.13-23
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• 2008

In this study, a finite element (FE) model updating method based on the hybrid genetic algorithm (HGA) is proposed to improve the grillage FE model for plate girder bridges. HGA consists of a genetic algorithm (GA) and direct search method (DS) based on a modification of Nelder & Mead's simplex optimization method (NMS). Fitness functions based on natural frequencies, mode shapes, and static deflections making use of the measurements and analytical results are also presented to apply in the proposed method. In addition, a multi-objective function has been formulated as a linear combination of fitness functions in order to simultaneously improve both stiffness and mass. The applicability of the proposed method to girder bridge structures has been verified through a numerical example on a two-span continuous grillage FE model, as well as through an experimental test on a simply supported plate girder skew bridge. In addition, the effect of measuring error is considered as random noise, and its effect is investigated by numerical simulation. Through numerical and experimental verification, it has been proven that the proposed method is feasible and effective for FE model updating on plate girder bridges.

• Journal of Korean Society of Steel Construction
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.717-726
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• 2006

Traditional external post-tensioning method using either steel bars or tendons is commonly used as a retrofitting method for steel composite bridges. However, the method has some disadvantages such as stress concentration at anchorages and inefficient load-carrying capability of live loads. Multi-stepwise prestressing method using thermal expanded coverplate is a newly proposed prestressing method, which was originally developed for prestressing steel structures. A new retrofitting method for steel girder bridges founded on a simple concept of thermal expansion and contraction of cover plate, the method is a hybrid of and combines the advantages of external post-tensioning and thermal prestressing. In this paper, basic concepts of the method are presented and an illustrative experiment is introduced. From actual experimental data, the thermal prestressing effect was substantiated and the FEM approach for its analysis was verified. The retrofitting effects ofa single-span bridge were analyzed and the feasibility of the developed method was examined.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.487-499
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• 2020

This paper proposes a novel approach to model updating for a large-scale cable-stayed bridge based on ambient vibration tests coupled with a hybrid metaheuristic search algorithm. Vibration measurements are carried out under excitation sources of passing vehicles and wind. Based on the measured structural dynamic characteristics, a finite element (FE) model is updated. For long-span bridges, ambient vibration test (AVT) is the most effective vibration testing technique because ambient excitation is freely available, whereas a forced vibration test (FVT) requires considerable efforts to install actuators such as shakers to produce measurable responses. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a famous metaheuristic algorithm applied successfully in numerous fields over the last decades. However, PSO has big drawbacks that may decrease its efficiency in tackling the optimization problems. A possible drawback of PSO is premature convergence leading to low convergence level, particularly in complicated multi-peak search issues. On the other hand, PSO not only depends crucially on the quality of initial populations, but also it is impossible to improve the quality of new generations. If the positions of initial particles are far from the global best, it may be difficult to seek the best solution. To overcome the drawbacks of PSO, we propose a hybrid algorithm combining GA with an improved PSO (HGAIPSO). Two striking characteristics of HGAIPSO are briefly described as follows: (1) because of possessing crossover and mutation operators, GA is applied to generate the initial elite populations and (2) those populations are then employed to seek the best solution based on the global search capacity of IPSO that can tackle the problem of premature convergence of PSO. The results show that HGAIPSO not only identifies uncertain parameters of the considered bridge accurately, but also outperforms than PSO, improved PSO (IPSO), and a combination of GA and PSO (HGAPSO) in terms of convergence level and accuracy.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.6 no.5_6
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• pp.481-504
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• 2010

Wireless smart sensor networks (WSSNs) have been proposed by a number of researchers to evaluate the current condition of civil infrastructure, offering improved understanding of dynamic response through dense instrumentation. As focus moves from laboratory testing to full-scale implementation, the need for multi-hop communication to address issues associated with the large size of civil infrastructure and their limited radio power has become apparent. Multi-hop communication protocols allow sensors to cooperate to reliably deliver data between nodes outside of direct communication range. However, application specific requirements, such as high sampling rates, vast amounts of data to be collected, precise internodal synchronization, and reliable communication, are quite challenging to achieve with generic multi-hop communication protocols. This paper proposes two complementary reliable multi-hop communication solutions for monitoring of civil infrastructure. In the first approach, termed herein General Purpose Multi-hop (GPMH), the wide variety of communication patterns involved in structural health monitoring, particularly in decentralized implementations, are acknowledged to develop a flexible and adaptable any-to-any communication protocol. In the second approach, termed herein Single-Sink Multi-hop (SSMH), an efficient many-to-one protocol utilizing all available RF channels is designed to minimize the time required to collect the large amounts of data generated by dense arrays of sensor nodes. Both protocols adopt the Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol, which provides any-to-any routing and multi-cast capability, and supports a broad range of communication patterns. The proposed implementations refine the routing metric by considering the stability of links, exclude functionality unnecessary in mostly-static WSSNs, and integrate a reliable communication layer with the AODV protocol. These customizations have resulted in robust realizations of multi-hop reliable communication that meet the demands of structural health monitoring.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.243-262
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• 2015

Optimal sensor placement (OSP) is a critical issue in construction and implementation of a sophisticated structural health monitoring (SHM) system. The uncertainties in the identified structural parameters based on the measured data may dramatically reduce the reliability of the condition evaluation results. In this paper, the information entropy, which provides an uncertainty metric for the identified structural parameters, is adopted as the performance measure for a sensor configuration, and the OSP problem is formulated as the multi-objective optimization problem of extracting the Pareto optimal sensor configurations that simultaneously minimize the appropriately defined information entropy indices. The nondirective movement glowworm swarm optimization (NMGSO) algorithm (based on the basic glowworm swarm optimization (GSO) algorithm) is proposed for identifying the effective Pareto optimal sensor configurations. The one-dimensional binary coding system is introduced to code the glowworms instead of the real vector coding method. The Hamming distance is employed to describe the divergence of different glowworms. The luciferin level of the glowworm is defined as a function of the rank value (RV) and the crowding distance (CD), which are deduced by non-dominated sorting. In addition, nondirective movement is developed to relocate the glowworms. A numerical simulation of a long-span suspension bridge is performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the NMGSO algorithm. The results indicate that the NMGSO algorithm is capable of capturing the Pareto optimal sensor configurations with high accuracy and efficiency.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.181-193
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• 2022

Data-driven structural health monitoring (SHM) of civil infrastructure can be used to continuously assess the state of a structure, allowing preemptive safety measures to be carried out. Long-term monitoring of large-scale civil infrastructure often involves data-collection using a network of numerous sensors of various types. Malfunctioning sensors in the network are common, which can disrupt the condition assessment and even lead to false-negative indications of damage. The overwhelming size of the data collected renders manual approaches to ensure data quality intractable. The task of detecting and classifying an anomaly in the raw data is non-trivial. We propose an approach to automate this task, improving upon the previously developed technique of image-based pre-processing on one-dimensional (1D) data by enriching the features of the neural network input data with multiple channels. In particular, feature engineering is employed to convert the measured time histories into a 3-channel image comprised of (i) the time history, (ii) the spectrogram, and (iii) the probability density function representation of the signal. To demonstrate this approach, a CNN model is designed and trained on a dataset consisting of acceleration records of sensors installed on a long-span bridge, with the goal of fault detection and classification. The effect of imbalance in anomaly patterns observed is studied to better account for unseen test cases. The proposed framework achieves high overall accuracy and recall even when tested on an unseen dataset that is much larger than the samples used for training, offering a viable solution for implementation on full-scale structures where limited labeled-training data is available.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.759-768
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• 2015

The ground motions of large dimensional structures such as long span bridges at different stations during an earthquake, are inevitably different, which is known as the ground motion spatial variation effect. There are many causes that may result in the spatial variability in seismic ground motion, e.g., the wave passage effect due to the different arrival times of waves at different locations; the loss of coherency due to seismic waves scattering in the heterogeneous medium of the ground; the site amplification effect owing to different local soil properties. In previous researches, the site amplification effects have not been considered or considered by a single-layered soil model only. In this study, however, the ground motion amplification and filtering effects are evaluated by multi-layered soil model. Spatially varying ground motion at the sites with different number of layers, depths, and soil characteristics are generated and the variation characteristics of ground motion time histories according to the correlation of coherency loss function and soil conditions are evaluated. For the bridge system composed of two unit bridges, seismic behavior characteristics are analyzed using the generated seismic waves as input ground motion. Especially, relative displacement due to coherency loss and site effect which can cause the unseating and pounding between girders are evaluated. As a result, considering the soil conditions of each site are always important and should not be neglected for an accurate structural response analysis.