• Wind and Structures
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.693-707
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• 2015

The efficiency of wind turbines (WT) is primarily reflected in their ability to generate electricity at any time. Downtimes of WTs due to "conventional" inspections are cost-intensive and undesirable for investors. For this reason, there is a need for structural health monitoring (SHM) systems, to enable service and maintenance on demand and to increase the inspection intervals. In general, monitoring increases the cost effectiveness of WTs. This publication concentrates on the application of two vibration-based SHM algorithms for stability and structural change monitoring of offshore WTs. Only data driven, output-only algorithms based on stochastic subspace identification (SSI) in time domain are considered. The centerpiece of this paper deals with the rough mathematical description of the dynamic behavior of offshore WTs and with the basic presentation of stochastic subspace-based algorithms and their application to these structures. Due to the early stage of the industrial application of SHM on offshore WT on the one side and the required confidentiality to the plant manufacturer and operator on the other side, up to now it is not possible to analyze different isolated structural damages resp. changes in a systematic manner, directly by means of in-situ measurement and to make these "acknowledgements" publicly available. For this reason, the sensitivity of the methods for monitoring purposes are demonstrated through their application on long time measurements from a 1:10 large scale test rig of an offshore WT under different conditions: undamaged, different levels of loosened bolt connections between tower parts, different levels of fouling, scouring and structure inclination. The limitation and further requirements for the approaches and their applicability on real foundations are discussed along the paper.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.7 no.6
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• pp.487-502
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• 2007

In recent decades there has been a trend towards improved mechanical characteristics of materials used in footbridge construction. It has enabled engineers to design lighter, slender and more aesthetic structures. As a result of these construction trends, many footbridges have become more susceptible to vibrations when subjected to dynamic loads. In addition to this, some inherit modelling uncertainties related to a lack of information on the as-built structure, such as boundary conditions, material properties, and the effects of non-structural elements make difficult to evaluate modal properties of footbridges, analytically. For these purposes, modal testing of footbridges is used to rectify these problems after construction. This paper describes an arch type steel footbridge, its analytical modelling, modal testing and finite element model calibration. A modern steel footbridge which has arch type structural system and located on the Karadeniz coast road in Trabzon, Turkey is selected as an application. An analytical modal analysis is performed on the developed 3D finite element model of footbridge to provide the analytical frequencies and mode shapes. The field ambient vibration tests on the footbridge deck under natural excitation such as human walking and traffic loads are conducted. The output-only modal parameter identification is carried out by using the peak picking of the average normalized power spectral densities in the frequency domain and stochastic subspace identification in the time domain, and dynamic characteristics such as natural frequencies mode shapes and damping ratios are determined. The finite element model of footbridge is calibrated to minimize the differences between analytically and experimentally estimated modal properties by changing some uncertain modelling parameters such as material properties. At the end of the study, maximum differences in the natural frequencies are reduced from 22% to only %5 and good agreement is found between analytical and experimental dynamic characteristics such as natural frequencies, mode shapes by model calibration.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.87-102
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• 2013

Vibration-based damage detection methods are popular for structural health monitoring. However, they can only detect fairly large damages. Usually impact pulse, ambient vibrations and sine-wave forces are applied as the excitations. In this paper, we propose the method to use the chaotic excitation to vibrate structures. The attractors built from the output responses are used for the minor damage detection. After the damage is detected, it is further quantified using the Kalman Filter. Simulations are conducted. A 5-story building is subjected to chaotic excitation. The structural responses and related attractors are analyzed. The results show that the attractor distances increase monotonously with the increase of the damage degree. Therefore, damages, including minor damages, can be effectively detected using the proposed approach. With the Kalman Filter, damage which has the stiffness decrease of about 5% or lower can be quantified. The proposed approach will be helpful for detecting and evaluating minor damages at the early stage.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.299-314
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• 2003

This investigation presents an efficient method for identifying modal characteristics from the measured displacement, velocity and acceleration signals of multiple channels on structural systems. A Vector Backward Auto-Regressive model (VBAR) that describes the relationship between the output information in different time steps is used to establish a backward state equation. Generally, the accuracy of the identified dynamic characteristics can be improved by increasing the order of the Auto-Regressive model (AR) in cases of measurement of data under noisy circumstances. However, a higher-order AR model also induces more numerical modes, only some of which are the system modes. The proposed VBAR model provides a clear characteristic boundary to separate the system modes from the spurious modes. A numerical example of a lumped-mass model with three DOFs was established to verify the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method. Finally, an offshore platform model was experimentally employed as an application case to confirm the proposed VBAR method can be applied to real-world structures.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.471-489
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• 2016

Modal identification based on ambient vibration data has attracted extensive attention in the past few decades. Since the excitation for ambient vibration tests is mainly from the environmental effects such as wind and traffic loading and no artificial excitation is applied, the signal to noise (s/n) ratio of the data acquired plays an important role in mode identifiability. Under ambient vibration conditions, certain modes may not be identifiable due to a low s/n ratio. This paper presents a study on the mode identifiability of an instrumented cable-stayed bridge with the use of acceleration response data measured by a long-term structural health monitoring system. A recently developed fast Bayesian FFT method is utilized to perform output-only modal identification. In addition to identifying the most probable values (MPVs) of modal parameters, the associated posterior uncertainties can be obtained by this method. Likewise, the power spectral density of modal force can be identified, and thus it is possible to obtain the modal s/n ratio. This provides an efficient way to investigate the mode identifiability. Three groups of data are utilized in this study: the first one is 10 data sets including six collected under normal wind conditions and four collected during typhoons; the second one is three data sets with wind speeds of about 7.5 m/s; and the third one is some blind data. The first two groups of data are used to perform ambient modal identification and help to estimate a critical value of the s/n ratio above which the deficient mode is identifiable, while the third group of data is used to perform verification. A couple of fundamental modes are identified, including the ones in the vertical and transverse directions respectively and coupled in both directions. The uncertainty and s/n ratio of the deficient mode are investigated and discussed. A critical value of the modal s/n ratio is suggested to evaluate the mode identifiability of the deficient mode. The work presented in this paper could provide a base for the vibration-based condition assessment in future.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.61 no.2
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• pp.267-274
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• 2017

In this study was investigated of possibility using the recorded micro tremor data on ground level as ambient vibration input excitation data for investigation and application Operational Modal Analysis (OMA) on the bench-scale earthquake simulator (The Quanser Shake Table) for model steel structures. As known OMA methods (such as EFDD, SSI and so on) are supposed to deal with the ambient responses. For this purpose, analytical and experimental modal analysis of a model steel structure for dynamic characteristics was evaluated. 3D Finite element model of the building was evaluated for the model steel structure based on the design drawing. Ambient excitation was provided by shake table from the recorded micro tremor ambient vibration data on ground level. Enhanced Frequency Domain Decomposition is used for the output only modal identification. From this study, best correlation is found between mode shapes. Natural frequencies and analytical frequencies in average (only) 2.8% are differences.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.83-101
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• 2005

This paper summarizes the application of a rational methodology for the structural assessment of older reinforced concrete Tunisian bridges. This methodology is based on ambient vibration measurement of the bridge, identification of the structure's modal signature and finite element model updating. The selected case study is the Boujnah bridge of the Tunis-Msaken Highway. This bridge is made of a continuous four-span simply supported reinforced concrete slab without girders resting on elastomeric bearings at each support. Ambient vibration tests were conducted on the bridge using a data acquisition system with nine force-balance accelerometers placed at selected locations of the bridge. The Enhanced Frequency Domain Decomposition technique was applied to extract the dynamic characteristics of the bridge. The finite element model was updated in order to obtain a reasonable correlation between experimental and numerical modal properties. For the model updating part of the study, the parameters selected for the updating process include the concrete modulus of elasticity, the elastic bearing stiffness and the foundation spring stiffnesses. The primary objective of the paper is to demonstrate the use of the Enhanced Frequency Domain Decomposition technique combined with model updating to provide data that could be used to assess the structural condition of the selected bridge. The application of the proposed methodology led to a relatively faithful linear elastic model of the bridge in its present condition.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.84 no.4
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• pp.489-502
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• 2022

This paper is aimed at developing an optimization-based Finite Element model updating approach for structural damage identification and quantification. A modal flexibility-based error function is introduced, which uses modal assurance criterion to formulate the updating problem as an optimization problem. Because of the inexplicit input/output relationship between the candidate solutions and the error function's output, a robust and efficient optimization algorithm should be employed to evaluate the solution domain and find the global extremum with high speed and accuracy. This paper proposes a new multi-stage Selective Particle Swarm Optimization (SPSO) algorithm to solve the optimization problem. The proposed multi-stage strategy not only fixes the premature convergence of the original Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm, but also increases the speed of the search stage and reduces the corresponding computational costs, without changing or adding extra terms to the algorithm's formulation. Solving the introduced objective function with the proposed multi-stage SPSO leads to a smart feedback-wise and self-adjusting damage detection method, which can effectively assess the health of the structural systems. The performance and precision of the proposed method are verified and benchmarked against the original PSO and some of its most popular variants, including SPSO, DPSO, APSO, and MSPSO. For this purpose, two numerical examples of complex civil engineering structures under different damage patterns are studied. Comparative studies are also carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed method in the presence of measurement errors. Moreover, the robustness and accuracy of the method are validated by assessing the health of a six-story shear-type building structure tested on a shake table. The obtained results introduced the proposed method as an effective and robust damage detection method even if the first few vibration modes are utilized to form the objective function.

• KIEAE Journal
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.147-152
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• 2007

Numerous non-destructive tests(NDT) to assess the safety of real structures have been developed. System identification(SI) techniques using dynamic responses and behaviors of structural systems become an outstanding issue of researchers. However the conventional SI techniques are identified to be non-practical to the complex and tall buildings, due to limitation of the availability of an accurate data that is magnitude or location of external loads. In most SI approaches, the information on input loading and output responses must be known. In many cases, measuring the input information may take most of the resources, and it is very difficult to accurately measure the input information during actual vibrations of practical importance, e.g., earthquakes, winds, micro seismic tremors, and mechanical vibration. However, the desirability and application potential of SI to real structures could be highly improved if an algorithm is available that can estimate structural parameters based on the response data alone without the input information. Thus a technique to estimate structural properties of building without input measurement data and using limited response is essential in structural health monitoring. In this study, shaking table tests on three-story plane frame steel structures were performed. Out-put only model analysis on the measured data was performed, and the dynamic properties were inverse analyzed using least square method in time domain. In results damage detection was performed in each member level, which was performed at story level in conventional SI techniques of frequency domain.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.257-280
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• 2014

In this paper, a novel PARAllel FACtor (PARAFAC) decomposition based Blind Source Separation (BSS) algorithm is proposed for modal identification of structures equipped with tuned mass dampers. Tuned mass dampers (TMDs) are extremely effective vibration absorbers in tall flexible structures, but prone to get de-tuned due to accidental changes in structural properties, alteration in operating conditions, and incorrect design forecasts. Presence of closely spaced modes in structures coupled with TMDs renders output-only modal identification difficult. Over the last decade, second-order BSS algorithms have shown significant promise in the area of ambient modal identification. These methods employ joint diagonalization of covariance matrices of measurements to estimate the mixing matrix (mode shape coefficients) and sources (modal responses). Recently, PARAFAC BSS model has evolved as a powerful multi-linear algebra tool for decomposing an $n^{th}$ order tensor into a number of rank-1 tensors. This method is utilized in the context of modal identification in the present study. Covariance matrices of measurements at several lags are used to form a $3^{rd}$ order tensor and then PARAFAC decomposition is employed to obtain the desired number of components, comprising of modal responses and the mixing matrix. The strong uniqueness properties of PARAFAC models enable direct source separation with fine spectral resolution even in cases where the number of sensor observations is less compared to the number of target modes, i.e., the underdetermined case. This capability is exploited to separate closely spaced modes of the TMDs using partial measurements, and subsequently to estimate modal parameters. The proposed method is validated using extensive numerical studies comprising of multi-degree-of-freedom simulation models equipped with TMDs, as well as with an experimental set-up.