• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Propulsion Engineers Conference
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• 2008.03a
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• pp.557-560
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• 2008

A two-dimensional particle-in-cell(PIC) simulation with a Monte-Carlo Collision(MCC) has been developed to investigate the discharge characteristics of the acceleration channel of a HET. The dynamics of electrons and ions are treated with PIC method at the time scale of electrons in order to investigate the particle transport. The densities of charged particles are coupled with Poisson's equation. Xenon neutrals are injected from the anode and experience elastic, excitation, and ionization collisions with electrons, and are scattered by ions. These collisions are simulated by using an MCC model. The effects of control parameters such as magnetic field profile, electron current density, and the applied voltage have been investigated. The secondary electron emission on the dielectric surface is also considered.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.10 no.6
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• pp.545-559
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• 2000

A Wind and Structural Health Monitoring System (WASHMS) has been installed in the Tsing Ma suspension Bridge in Hong Kong with one of the objectives being the verification of analytical processes used in wind-resistant design. On 2 August 1997, Typhoon Victor just crossed over the Bridge and the WASHMS timely recorded both wind and structural response. The measurement data are analysed in this paper to obtain the mean wind speed, mean wind direction, mean wind inclination, turbulence intensity, integral scale, gust factor, wind spectrum, and the acceleration response and natural frequency of the Bridge. It is found that some features of wind structure and bridge response are difficult to be considered in the currently used analytical process for predicting buffeting response of long suspension bridges, for the Bridge is surrounded by a complex topography and the wind direction of Typhoon Victor changes during its crossing. It seems to be necessary to improve the prediction model so that a reasonable comparison can be performed between the measurement and prediction for long suspension bridges in typhoon prone regions.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.189-208
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• 2006

Monitoring large-scale civil engineering structures such as offshore platforms and high-large buildings requires a large number of sensors of different types. Innovative sensor data information technologies are very extremely important for data transmission, storage and retrieval of large volume sensor data generated from large sensor networks. How to obtain the optimal sensor set and placement is more and more concerned by researchers in vibration-based SHM. In this paper, a method of determining the sensor location which aims to extract the dynamic parameter effectively is presented. The method selects the number and place of sensor being installed on or in structure by through the tolerance domain statistical inference algorithm combined with second order sensitivity technology. The method proposal first finds and determines the sub-set sensors from the theoretic measure point derived from analytical model by the statistical tolerance domain procedure under the principle of modal effective independence. The second step is to judge whether the sorted out measured point set has sensitive to the dynamic change of structure by utilizing second order characteristic value sensitivity analysis. A 76-high-building benchmark mode and an offshore platform structure sensor optimal selection are demonstrated and result shows that the method is available and feasible.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.127-140
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• 2006

In this study, a wavelet-based covariance-driven system identification technique is proposed for damage assessment of structures under ambient excitation. Assuming the ambient excitation to be a white-noise process, the covariance computation is shown to be able to separate the effect of random excitation from the response measurement. Wavelet transform (WT) is then used to convert the covariance response in the time domain to the WT magnitude plot in the time-scale plane. The wavelet coefficients along the curves where energy concentrated are extracted and used to estimate the modal properties of the structure. These modal property estimations lead to the calculation of the stiffness matrix when either the spectral density of the random loading or the mass matrix is given. The predicted stiffness matrix hence provides a direct assessment on the possible location and severity of damage which results in stiffness alteration. To demonstrate the proposed wavelet-based damage assessment technique, a numerical example on a 3 degree-of-freedom (DOF) system and an experimental study on a three-story building model, which are all under a broad-band excitation, are presented. Both numerical and experimental results illustrate that the proposed technique can provide an accurate assessment on the damage location. It is however noted that the assessment of damage severity is not as accurate, which might be due to the errors associated with the mode shape estimations as well as the assumption of proportional damping adopted in the formulation.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.585-599
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• 2016

Steel cables serve as the key structural components in long-span bridges, and the force state of the steel cable is deemed to be one of the most important determinant factors representing the safety condition of bridge structures. The disadvantages of traditional cable force measurement methods have been envisaged and development of an effective alternative is still desired. In the last decade, the vision-based sensing technology has been rapidly developed and broadly applied in the field of structural health monitoring (SHM). With the aid of vision-based multi-point structural displacement measurement method, monitoring of the tensile force of the steel cable can be realized. In this paper, a novel cable force monitoring system integrated with a multi-point pattern matching algorithm is developed. The feasibility and accuracy of the developed vision-based force monitoring system has been validated by conducting the uniaxial tensile tests of steel bars, steel wire ropes, and parallel strand cables on a universal testing machine (UTM) as well as a series of moving loading experiments on a scale arch bridge model. The comparative study of the experimental outcomes indicates that the results obtained by the vision-based system are consistent with those measured by the traditional method for cable force measurement.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.191-209
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• 2016

Wind tunnel tests of a 1/2200-scale mountainous terrain model have been carried out to investigate local wind characteristics at a bridge location in southeast Tibet, China. Flows at five key locations on the bridge at deck level were measured for 26 directions. It was observed that wind characteristics (including mean wind velocity and overall turbulence intensity) vary significantly depending on the approaching wind direction and measurement position. The wind inclination angle measured in the study fluctuated between $-18^{\circ}$ and $+16^{\circ}$ and the ratio of mean wind velocity to reference wind velocity was small when the wind inclination angles were large, especially for positive wind inclination angles. The design standard wind speed and the minimum critical wind speed for flutter rely on the wind inclination angle and should be determined from the results of such tests. The variation of wind speed with wind inclination angles should be of the asymmetry step type. The turbulence characteristics of the wind were found to be similar to real atmospheric flows.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.169-189
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• 2015

Convergence difficulty and available complete measurement information have been considered as two primary challenges for the identification of large-scale engineering structures. In this paper, a time domain substructural identification approach by combining a weighted adaptive iteration (WAI) algorithm and an extended Kalman filter method with a weighted global iteration (EFK-WGI) algorithm was proposed for simultaneous identification of physical parameters of concerned substructures and unknown external excitations applied on it with limited response measurements. In the proposed approach, according to the location of the unknown dynamic loadings and the partially available structural response measurements, part of structural parameters of the concerned substructure and the unknown loadings were first identified with the WAI approach. The remaining physical parameters of the concerned substructure were then determined by EFK-WGI basing on the previously identified loadings and substructural parameters. The efficiency and accuracy of the proposed approach was demonstrated via a 20-story shear building structure and 23 degrees of freedom (DOFs) planar truss model with unknown external excitation and limited observations. Results show that the proposed approach is capable of satisfactorily identifying both the substructural parameters and unknown loading within limited iterations when both the excitation and dynamic response are partially unknown.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.57 no.1
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• pp.179-200
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• 2016

In this paper the differential transformation method (DTM) is utilized for vibration and buckling analysis of nanotubes in thermal environment while considering the coupled surface and nonlocal effects. The Eringen's nonlocal elasticity theory takes into account the effect of small size while the Gurtin-Murdoch model is used to incorporate the surface effects (SE). The derived governing differential equations are solved by DTM which demonstrated to have high precision and computational efficiency in the vibration analysis of nanobeams. The detailed mathematical derivations are presented and numerical investigations are performed while the emphasis is placed on investigating the effect of thermal loading, small scale and surface effects, mode number, thickness ratio and boundary conditions on the normalized natural frequencies and critical buckling loads of the nanobeams in detail. The results show that the surface effects lead to an increase in natural frequency and critical buckling load of nanotubes. It is explicitly shown that the vibration and buckling of a nanotube is significantly influenced by these effects and the influence of thermal loadings and nonlocal effects are minimal.

• Advances in nano research
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.85-111
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• 2016

In this paper, the classical and non-classical boundary conditions effect on free vibration characteristics of functionally graded (FG) size-dependent nanobeams are investigated by presenting a semi analytical differential transform method (DTM) for the first time. Three kinds of mathematical models, namely; power law (P-FGM), sigmoid (S-FGM) and Mori-Tanaka (MT-FGM) distribution are considered to describe the material properties in the thickness direction. The nonlocal Eringen theory takes into account the effect of small size, which enables the present model to become effective in the analysis and design of nanosensors and nanoactuators. Governing equations are derived through Hamilton's principle and they are solved applying semi analytical differential transform method. The good agreement between the results of this article and those available in literature validated the presented approach. The detailed mathematical derivations are presented and numerical investigations are performed while the emphasis is placed on investigating the effect of the several parameters such as small scale effects, spring constant factors, various material compositions and mode number on the normalized natural frequencies of the FG nanobeams in detail. It is explicitly shown that the vibration of FG nanobeams is significantly influenced by these effects. Numerical results are presented to serve as benchmarks for future analyses of FG nanobeams.

• Advances in nano research
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.51-64
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• 2016

This paper investigates the effects of thermal load and shear force on the buckling of nanobeams. Higher-order shear deformation beam theories are implemented and their predictions of the critical buckling load and post-buckled configurations are compared to those of Euler-Bernoulli and Timoshenko beam theories. The nonlocal Eringen elasticity model is adopted to account a size-dependence at the nano-scale. Analytical closed form solutions for critical buckling loads and post-buckling configurations are derived for proposed beam theories. This would be helpful for those who work in the mechanical analysis of nanobeams especially experimentalists working in the field. Results show that thermal load has a more significant impact on the buckling behavior of simply-supported beams (S-S) than it has on clamped-clamped (C-C) beams. However, the nonlocal effect has more impact on C-C beams that it does on S-S beams. Moreover, it was found that the predictions obtained from Timoshenko beam theory are identical to those obtained using all higher-order shear deformation theories, suggesting that Timoshenko beam theory is sufficient to analyze buckling in nanobeams.