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.

A dynamic stiffness-based framework for harmonic input estimation and response reconstruction considering damage

In structural health monitoring(SHM),the measurement is point-wise but structures are continuous.Thus,input estimation has become a hot research subject with which the full-field structural response can be calculated with a finite element model(FEM).This paper proposes a framework based on the dynamic stiffness theory,to estimate harmonic input,reconstruct responses,and to localize damages from seriously deficient measurements.To begin,Fourier transform converts the dynamic equilibrium equation to an equivalent static one in the frequency domain,which is underdetermined since the dimension of measurement vector is far less than the FEM-node number.The principal component analysis has been adopted to“compress”the under-determined equation,and formed an over-determined equation to estimate the unknown input.Then,inverse Fourier transform converts the estimated input in the frequency domain to the time domain.Applying this to the FEM can reconstruct the target responses.If a structure is damaged,the estimated nodal force can localize the damage.To improve the damage-detection accuracy,a multi-measurement-based indicator has been proposed.Numerical simulations have validated that the proposed framework can capably estimate input and reconstruct multi-types of full-field responses,and the damage indicator can localize minor damages even with the existence of noise.

Image reconstruction of a neutron scatter camera

Recently, Sandia Laboratories developed a neutron scatter camera to detect special nuclear materials. This camera exhibits the following advantages: high efficiency, direction discrimination, neutron-gamma discrimination ability, and wide field of view. However, using the direct projection method, the angular resolution of this camera is limited by uncertainties in the energies estimated from pulse height and time of flight measurements. In this study, we established an eight-element neutron scatter camera and conducted the experiment with a ^(252)Cf neutron source. The results show that it has an angular resolution better than 8°(1s) and a detection efficiency of approximately 2.6′10-4. Using maximum likelihood expectation maximization method, the image artifact was eliminated, and the angular resolution was improved. We proposed an average scattering angle method to estimate the scattering energy of neutrons and Compton gamma rays. As such, we can obtain a recognizable image and energy spectrum of the source with some degradation of energy and image resolutions. Finally, a newly measured light response function based on the MPD^(-4) device was used for image reconstruction. Although we did not obtain a better result than that of the standard light response function, we have observed the effects of light response function on image reconstruction.