Full-Field Strain Reconstruction Using Uniaxial Strain Measurements: Application to Damage Detection

This work investigates the inverse problem of reconstructing the continuous displacement field of a structure using a spatially distributed set of discrete uniaxial strain data. The proposed technique is based on the inverse Finite Element Method (iFEM), which has been demonstrated to be suitable for full-field displacement, and subsequently strain, reconstruction in beam and plate structures using discrete or continuous surface strain measurements. The iFEM uses a variationally based approach to displacement reconstruction, where an error functional is discretized using a set of finite elements. The effects of position and orientation of uniaxial strain measurements on the iFEM results are investigated, and the use of certain strain smoothing strategies for improving reconstruction accuracy is discussed. Reconstruction performance using uniaxial strain data is examined numerically using the problem of a thin plate with an internal crack. The results obtained highlight that strain field reconstruction using the proposed strategy can provide useful information regarding the presence, position, and orientation of damage on the plate.

Bridge Health Monitoring via Displacement Reconstruction-Based NB-IoT Technology

An aged bridge’s performance is affected by degradation and becomes one of the major concerns in maintenance. A preliminary, simple and workable procedure of bridge damage detection is required to minimize maintenance costs. In the past, frequency is one of the most common indicators to detect damage occurrence. Recent research found that using frequency as a health indicator still has room to improve. Alternatively, dynamic displacement is used as an indicator in the current study. These dynamic displacements are reconstructed based on measured acceleration records from micro electro mechanical system (MEMS) sensors. The Newmark-beta method with Windows is proposed to acquire the reconstructed displacements of considered bridges. To demonstrate the accuracy and applicability of the proposed approach, three different experiments are carried out; (i) A small scale bridge with the implementation of MEMS acceleration sensors; (ii) a numerical complex finite element method (FEM) bridge model; (iii) an actual bridge with the implementation of MEMS acceleration sensors and narrow bandwidth Internet of things (NB-IoT) technology. The first experiment shows that the proposed method can successfully identify the difference between damaged/undamaged bridges and determine damage location. The second experiment indicates that the proposed method is able to identify the difference between stiffened/unstiffened bridges. The last experiment shows the applicability of the proposed method on an actual bridge health monitoring project.

Experimental Investigation on Vortex-Induced Vibration of a Flexible Pipe under Higher Mode in an Oscillatory Flow

Different from the previous studies of the vortex-induced vibration (VIV) dominated by first mode of flexible pipe in an oscillatory flow, the features of a higher mode dominated are experimentally investigated in the ocean basin. The flexible pipe is forced to harmonically oscillate with different combinations of a period and amplitude. The design dominant mode consists of first and second modes under the maximum reduced velocity (VR) of approximately 5.5 with a KC number ranging from 22 to 165. The VIV responses between only the excited first mode and the excited higher mode are compared and studied using displacement reconstruction and wavelet transform methods. The discrepancies of spatial and temporal response between smaller and larger KC numbers (KC = 56 and 121) are first observed. The strong alternate mode dominance and lock-in phenomena occur in the case of larger KC numbers, while they cannot be observed in the case of smaller KC numbers under higher modes. The VIV dominant frequency in the in-line (IL) direction is found to be always triple the oscillatory flow frequency and not twice that in the cross flow (CF) direction. The dominant frequency in the CF direction can be predicted by the Strouhal law, and the Strouhal number is approximately 0.18 under VR = 5.5, which is not affected by the excited mode. Moreover, differences of response motion trajectory are also revealed in this paper. The present work improves the basic understanding of vessel motion induced VIV and provides helpful references for developing prediction methods of VIV in an oscillatory flow.