• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.415-426
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• 2009

This study focuses on the concept of multi-scale wireless sensor networks for damage detection in civil infrastructure systems by first over viewing the general network philosophy and attributes in the areas of data acquisition, data reduction, assessment and decision making. The data acquisition aspect includes a scalable wireless sensor network acquiring acceleration and strain data, triggered using a Restricted Input Network Activation scheme (RINAS) that extends network lifetime and reduces the size of the requisite undamaged reference pool. Major emphasis is given in this study to data reduction and assessment aspects that enable a decentralized approach operating within the hardware and power constraints of wireless sensor networks to avoid issues associated with packet loss, synchronization and latency. After over viewing various models for data reduction, the concept of a data-driven Bivariate Regressive Adaptive INdex (BRAIN) for damage detection is presented. Subsequent examples using experimental and simulated data verify two major hypotheses related to the BRAIN concept: (i) data-driven damage metrics are more robust and reliable than their counterparts and (ii) the use of heterogeneous sensing enhances overall detection capability of such data-driven damage metrics.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.393-402
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• 2017

Many vibration-based global damage detection methods attempt to extract modal parameters from vibration signals as the main structural features to detect damage. The local flexibility method is one promising method that requires only the first few fundamental modes to detect not only the location but also the extent of damage. Generally, the mode shapes in the lateral degree of freedom are extracted from lateral vibration signals and then used to detect damage for a beam structure. In this study, a new approach which employs the mode shapes in the rotary degree of freedom obtained from the macro-strain vibration signals to detect damage of a beam structure is proposed. In order to facilitate the application of mode shapes in the rotary degree of freedom for beam structures, the local flexibility method is modified and utilized. The proposed rotary approach is verified by numerical and experimental studies of simply supported beams. The results illustrate potential feasibility of the proposed new idea. Compared to the method that uses lateral measurements, the proposed rotary approach seems more robust to noise in the numerical cases considered. The sensor configuration could also be more flexible and customized for a beam structure. Primarily, the proposed approach seems more sensitive to damage when the damage is close to the supports of simply supported beams.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.261-281
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• 2020

Civil structures may experience progressive deterioration and damage under environmental and operational conditions over their service life. Finite element (FE) model updating method is one of the most important approaches for damage identification in structures due to its capabilities in structural health monitoring. Although various damage detection approaches have been investigated on structures, there are limited studies on large-sized space structures. Thus, this paper aims to investigate the applicability and efficiency of sensitivity-based FE model updating framework for damage identification in large space structures from a distinct point of view. This framework facilitates modeling and model updating in large and geometric complicated space structures. Considering sensitivity-based FE model updating and vibration measurements, the discrepancy between acceleration response data in real damaged structure and hypothetical damaged structure have been minimized through adjusting the updating parameters. The feasibility and efficiency of the above-mentioned approach for damage identification has finally been demonstrated with two numerical examples: a flat double layer grid and a double layer diamatic dome. According to the results, this method can detect, localize, and quantify damages in large-scaled space structures very accurately which is robust to noisy data. Also, requiring a remarkably small number of iterations to converge, typically less than four, demonstrates the computational efficiency of this method.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.13-27
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• 2023

Fatigue crack is a fatal problem for steel structures. Early detection and maintenance can help extend the service life and prevent hazards. This paper presents the ultrasonic guided waves-based (UGWs-based) fatigue crack detection of a steel I-beam. The semi-analytical finite element model has been built to obtain the wave propagation characteristics. Damage indices in both time and frequency domains were analyzed by considering the characteristic variations of UGWs including the amplitude, phase angle, and wave packet energy. The pulse-echo and pitch-catch methods were combined in the detection scheme. Lab-scale experiments were conducted on welded steel I-beams to verify the proposed method. Results show that the damage indices based on the characteristic variations in the time domain can identify and localize the fatigue crack before it enters the rapid growth stage. The damage severity can be reasonably evaluated by analyzing the time-domain damage indices. Two nonlinear damage indices in the frequency domain give earlier warnings of the fatigue crack than the time-domain damage indices do. The identification results based on the above two nonlinear indices are found to be less consistent under various excitation frequencies. More robust nonlinear techniques needed to be searched and tested for early crack detection in steel I-beams in further study.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.501-523
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• 2016

Electromechanical impedance (EMI) based structural health monitoring is performed by measuring the variation in the impedance due to the structural local damage. The impedance signals are acquired from the piezoelectric patches that are bonded on the structural surface. The impedance variation, which is directly related to the mechanical properties of the structure, indicates the presence of local structural damage. Two traditional EMI-based damage detection methods are based on calculating the difference between the measured impedance signals in the frequency domain from the baseline and the current structures. In this paper, a new structural damage detection approach by analyzing the time domain impedance responses is proposed. The measured time domain responses from the piezoelectric transducers will be used for analysis. With the use of the Time Frequency Autoregressive Moving Average (TFARMA) model, a damage index based on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is defined to identify the existence of the structural local damage. Experimental studies on a space steel truss bridge model in the laboratory are conducted to verify the proposed approach. Four piezoelectric transducers are attached at different locations and excited by a sweep-frequency signal. The impedance responses at different locations are analyzed with TFARMA model to investigate the effectiveness and performance of the proposed approach. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach is very sensitive and robust in detecting the bolt damage in the gusset plates of steel truss bridges.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.167-179
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• 2022

This article develops a long-term condition assessment method for stay cables in cable stayed bridges using the monitored cable tension forces under operational condition. Based on the concept of influence surface, the matched cable tension ratio of two cables located at the same side (either in the upstream side or downstream side) is theoretically proven to be related to the condition of stay cables and independent of the positions of vehicles on the bridge. A sensor grouping scheme is designed to ensure that reliable damage detection result can be obtained even when sensor fault occurs in the neighbor of the damaged cable. Cable forces measured from an in-service cable-stayed bridge in China are used to demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method. Damage detection results show that the proposed approach is sensitive to the rupture of wire damage in a specific cable and is robust to environmental effects, measurement noise, sensor fault and different traffic patterns. Using the damage sensitive feature in the proposed approach, the metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall and F1 score, which are used to evaluate the performance of damage detection, are 97.97%, 95.08%, 100% and 97.48%, respectively. These results indicate that the proposed approach can reliably detect the damage in stay cables. In addition, the proposed approach is efficient and promising with applications to the field monitoring of cables in cable-stayed bridges.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.379-402
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• 2021

Traditional approaches for structural health monitoring (SHM) seldom take ambient uncertainty (temperature, humidity, ambient vibration) into consideration, while their impacts on structural responses are substantial, leading to a possibility of raising false alarms. A few predictors model-based approaches deal with these uncertainties through complex numerical models running online, rendering the SHM approach to be compute-intensive, slow, and sometimes not practical. Also, with model-based approaches, the imperative need for a precise understanding of the structure often poses a problem for not so well understood complex systems. The present study employs a data-based approach coupled with Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) to correlate recorded response time histories under varying temperature conditions to corresponding damage scenarios. EMD decomposes the response signal into a finite set of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). A two-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (2DCNN) is further trained to associate these IMFs to the respective damage cases. The use of IMFs in place of raw signals helps to reduce the impact of sensor noise while preserving the essential spatio-temporal information less-sensitive to thermal effects and thereby stands as a better damage-sensitive feature than the raw signal itself. The proposed algorithm is numerically tested on a single span bridge under varying temperature conditions for different damage severities. The dynamic strain is recorded as the response since they are frame-invariant and cheaper to install. The proposed algorithm has been observed to be damage sensitive as well as sufficiently robust against measurement noise.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.687-702
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• 2015

A method based on derivatives of eigen-parameters is presented for damage detection in discrete systems with dampers. The damage is simulated by decrease on the stiffness coefficient and increase of the damping coefficient. In the forward analysis, the derivatives of eigen-parameters are derived for the discrete system. In the inverse analysis, a derivative of eigen-parameters based model updating approach is used to identify damages in frequency domain. Two numerical examples are investigated to illustrate efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method. Studies in this paper indicate that the proposed method is efficient and robust for both single and multiple damages and is insensitive to measurement noise. And satisfactory identified results can be obtained from few numbers of iterations.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.1035-1041
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• 2016

Internal cracks in products are invisible and can lead to fatal crashes or damage. Since X-rays can penetrate materials and be attenuated according to the material’s thickness and density, they have rapidly become the accepted technology for non-destructive inspection of internal cracks. This paper presents a robust crack filter based on local gray level variation and multiscale analysis for automatic detection of cracks in X-ray images. The proposed filter takes advantage of the image gray level and its local variations to detect cracks in the X-ray image. To overcome the problems of image noise and the non-uniform intensity of the X-ray image, a new method of estimating the local gray level variation is proposed in this paper. In order to detect various sizes of crack, this paper proposes using different neighboring distances to construct an image pyramid for multiscale analysis. By use of local gray level variation and multiscale analysis, the proposed crack filter is able to detect cracks of various sizes in X-ray images while contending with the problems of noise and non-uniform intensity. Experimental results show that the proposed crack filter outperforms the Gaussian model based crack filter and the LBP model based method in terms of detection accuracy, false detection ratio and processing speed.

• The Journal of The Korea Institute of Intelligent Transport Systems
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.55-64
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• 2018

In this paper, we propose fully convolutional neural networks based automatic detection of a pothole that directly causes driver's safety accidents and the vehicle damage. First, the training DB is collected through the camera installed in the vehicle while driving on the road, and the model is trained in the form of a semantic segmentation using the fully convolutional neural networks. In order to generate robust performance in a dark environment, we augmented the training DB according to brightness, and finally generated a total of 30,000 training images. In addition, a total of 450 evaluation DB was created to verify the performance of the proposed automatic pothole detection, and a total of four experts evaluated each image. As a result, the proposed pothole detection showed robust performance for missing.