Multi-type sensor placement and response reconstruction for building structures: Experimental investigations

Estimation of lateral displacement and acceleration responses is essential to assess safety and serviceability of high-rise buildings under dynamic loadings including earthquake excitations. However, the measurement information from the limited number of sensors installed in a building structure is often insufficient for the complete structural performance assessment. An integrated multi-type sensor placement and response reconstruction method has thus been proposed by the authors to tackle this problem. To validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method, an experimental investigation using a cantilever beam with multi-type sensors is performed and reported in this paper. The experimental setup is first introduced. The finite element modelling and model updating of the cantilever beam are then performed. The optimal sensor placement for the best response reconstruction is determined by the proposed method based on the updated FE model of the beam. After the sensors are installed on the physical cantilever beam, a number of experiments are carried out. The responses at key locations are reconstructed and compared with the measured ones. The reconstructed responses achieve a good match with the measured ones, manifesting the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. Besides, the proposed method is also examined for the cases of different excitations and unknown excitation, and the results prove the proposed method to be robust and effective. The superiority of the optimized sensor placement scheme is finally demonstrated through comparison with two other different sensor placement schemes: the accelerometer-only scheme and non-optimal sensor placement scheme. The proposed method can be applied to high-rise buildings for seismic performance assessment.

Multi-type sensor placement and response reconstruction for structural health monitoring of long-span suspension bridges

This study is devoted to the experimental validation of the multi-type sensor placement and response reconstruction method for structural health monitoring of long-span suspension bridges. The method for multi-type sensor placement and response reconstruction is briefly described. A test bed, comprising of a physical model and an updated finite element(FE) model of a long-span suspension bridge is also concisely introduced. The proposed method is then applied to the test bed; the equation of motion of the test bed subject to ground motion, the objective function for sensor location optimization, the principles for mode selection and multi-type response reconstruction are established. A numerical study using the updated FE model is performed to select the sensor types,numbers, and locations. Subsequently, with the identified sensor locations and some practical considerations, fiber Bragg grating(FBG) sensors, laser displacement transducers, and accelerometers are installed on the physical bridge model. Finally, experimental investigations are conducted to validate the proposed method. The experimental results show that the reconstructed responses using the measured responses from the limited number of multitype sensors agree well with the actual bridge responses.The proposed method is validated to be feasible and effective for the monitoring of structural behavior of longspan suspension bridges.

Corrosion damage assessment and monitoring of large steel space structures

Large steel space structures,when exposed to a harsh corrosive environment,are inevitably subjected to atmospheric corrosion and stress corrosion cracking.This paper proposes a framework for assessing the corrosion damage of large steel space structures subjected to both stress corrosion cracking and atmospheric corrosion.The empirical model for estimating atmospheric corrosion based on measured information is briefly introduced.The proposed framework is applied to a real large steel space structure built in the southern coastal area in China to assess its corrosion damage and investigate the effects of atmospheric corrosion on stress corrosion cracking.Based on the results,the conceptual design of the corrosion monitoring system of large steel space structures is finally conducted as the first step for a real corrosion monitoring system.

SHM-based F-AHP bridge rating system with application to Tsing Ma Bridge

This paper aims at developing a structural health monitoring(SHM)-based bridge rating method for bridge inspection of long-span cable-supported bridges.The fuzzy based analytic hierarchy approach is employed,and the hierarchical structure for synthetic rating of each structural component of the bridge is proposed.The criticality and vulnerability analyses are performed largely based on the field measurement data from the SHM system installed in the bridge to offer relatively accurate condition evaluation of the bridge and to reduce uncertainties involved in the existing rating method.The procedures for determining relative weighs and fuzzy synthetic ratings for both criticality and vulnerability are then suggested.The fuzzy synthetic decisions for inspection are made in consideration of the synthetic ratings of all structural components.The SHM-based bridge rating method is finally applied to the Tsing Ma suspension bridge in Hong Kong as a case study.The results show that the proposed method is feasible and it can be used in practice for longspan cable-supported bridges with SHM system.