• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.481-493
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• 2018

Ultrasonic guided waves have attracted increasing attention for non-destructive testing (NDT) and structural health monitoring (SHM) of bridge cables. They offer advantages like single measurement, wide coverage of acoustical field, and long-range propagation capability. To design defect detection systems, it is essential to understand how guided waves propagate in cables and how to select the optimal excitation frequency and mode. However, certain cable characteristics such as multiple wires, anchorage, and polyethylene (PE) sheath increase the complexity in analyzing the guided wave propagation. In this study, guided wave modes for multi-wire bridge cables are identified by using a semi-analytical finite element (SAFE) technique to obtain relevant dispersion curves. Numerical results indicated that the number of guided wave modes increases, the length of the flat region with a low frequency of L(0,1) mode becomes shorter, and the cutoff frequency for high order longitudinal wave modes becomes lower, as the number of steel wires in a cable increases. These findings were used in design of transducers for defect detection and selection of the optimal wave mode and frequency for subsequent experiments. A magnetostrictive transducer system was used to excite and detect the guided waves. The applicability of the proposed approach for detecting and locating wire breakages was demonstrated for a cable with 37 wires. The present ultrasonic guided wave method has been found to be very responsive to the number of brokenwires and is thus capable of detecting defects with varying sizes.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.75 no.6
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• pp.747-769
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• 2020

This paper provides a semi-analytical approach to investigate the variations of 3D displacement components, electric potential, stresses, electric displacements and transverse vibration frequencies in laminated piezoelectric composite plates based on the scaled boundary finite element method (SBFEM) and the precise integration algorithm (PIA). The proposed approach can analyze the static and dynamic responses of multilayered piezoelectric plates with any number of laminae, various geometrical shapes, boundary conditions, thickness-to-length ratios and stacking sequences. Only a longitudinal surface of the plate is discretized into 2D elements, which helps to improve the computational efficiency. Comparing with plate theories and other numerical methods, only three displacement components and the electric potential are set as the basic unknown variables and can be represented analytically through the transverse direction. The whole derivation is built upon the three dimensional key equations of elasticity for the piezoelectric materials and no assumptions on the plate kinematics have been taken. By virtue of the equilibrium equations, the constitutive relations and the introduced set of scaled boundary coordinates, three-dimensional governing partial differential equations are converted into the second order ordinary differential matrix equation. Furthermore, aided by the introduced internal nodal force, a first order ordinary differential equation is obtained with its general solution in the form of a matrix exponent. To further improve the accuracy of the matrix exponent in the SBFEM, the PIA is employed to make sure any desired accuracy of the mechanical and electric variables. By virtue of the kinetic energy technique, the global mass matrix of the composite plates constituted by piezoelectric laminae is constructed for the first time based on the SBFEM. Finally, comparisons with the exact solutions and available results are made to confirm the accuracy and effectiveness of the developed methodology. What's more, the effect of boundary conditions, thickness-to-length ratios and stacking sequences of laminae on the distributions of natural frequencies, mechanical and electric fields in laminated piezoelectric composite plates is evaluated.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.49 no.9
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• pp.3-10
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• 2012

In this paper, CDD(Cyclic Delay Diversity)-DSF(decode-and-selectively forward) relay schemes are proposed for MC-CDMA(multicarrier-code division multiple access) systems over multipath Rayleigh fading channels. On the contrary to general DSF schemes, each relay equipped a CDD method can transmit on single channel. Therefore, all link channels between destination and relays can be considered as a single channel which is widely delay spread. The cooperative diversity of relay networks can be obtained as the frequency diversity for MC-CDMA systems with proposed CDD schemes. Furthermore, a semi-analytical approach for the averaged bit error rare(BER) performance evaluation is proposed for the proposed CDD-DSF-Relay schemes. By simulation and numerical results, it is confirmed that the proposed one can be a possible solution to achieve cooperative diversity gain without a reduction of spectral efficiency.