Advancements in geospatial monitoring of structures

The need for advancements in geospatial monitoring of structures has evolved naturally as structures have become larger, more complex, and technology has continued to rapidly develop. Greater building heights generally lead to greater challenges for surveyors, limiting the practical use of traditional measurement methods. For this reason, a new complimentary method was developed and implemented to support elevation monitoring activities during construction of the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, California. While some studies have explored the use of strain gauges to monitor strain development within individual members, the primary contribution of this work is that it presents a practical and proven to be implementable approach to estimating elevation changes throughout a multi-story reinforced concrete core wall tower during construction while utilizing strain measurements acquired at intermittent levels. Construction in urban landscapes has the potential to impact existing infrastructure. Identifying and mitigating any associated construction impacts is critical to public safety and construction progress. The development of Automated Motorized Total Stations (AMTS) has provided an effective means to monitor deformations in structures adjacent to construction activity. AMTS provides real time results so that movements may be immediately identified and addressed. However, the design, implementation, management, and analysis of these systems has frequently been problematic. Inadequate monitoring specifications have led to systems that fail to perform as intended even when project requirements were satisfied. A collection of monitoring specifications and AMTS projects have been reviewed to identify why certain problems have occurred and recommendations have been made to increase the probability of success on monitoring projects. A deformation monitoring approach that defines location specific threshold values based on a statistical analysis of baseline measurements is also presented in this dissertation. Identifying potential causes for monitoring specifications to fail to perform as intended and a deformation monitoring approach that defines location specific threshold values are secondary contributions of this dissertation

On Nonlinear Cointegration Methods for Structural Health Monitoring

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is emerging as a crucial technology for the assessment and management of important assets in various industries. Thanks to the rapid developments of sensing technology and computing machines, large amounts of sensor data are now becoming much easier and cheaper to obtain from monitored structures, which consequently has enabled data-driven methods to become the main work forces for real world SHM systems. However, SHM practitioners soon discover a major problem for in-service SHM systems; that is the effect of environmental and operational variations (EOVs). Most assets (bridges, aircraft engines, wind turbines) are so important that they are too costly to be isolated for testing and examination purposes. Often, their structural properties are heavily in uenced by ambient environmental and operational conditions, or EOVs. So, the most important question raised for an effective SHM system is, how one could tell whether an alarm signal comes from structural damage or from EOVs? Cointegration, a method originating from econometric time series analysis, has proven to be one of the most promising approaches to address the above question. Cointegration is a property of nonstationary time series, it models the long-run relationship among multiple nonstationary time series. The idea of employing the cointegration method in the SHM context relies on the fact that this long-run relationship is immune to the changes caused by EOVs, but when damage occurs, this relationship no longer stands. The work in this thesis aims to further strengthen and extend conventional linear cointegration methods to a nonlinear context, by hybridising cointegration with machine learning and time series models. There are three contributions presented in this thesis: The first part is about a nonlinear cointegration method based on Gaussian process (GP) regression. Instead of using a linear regression, this part attempts to establish a nonlinear cointegrating regression with a GP. GP regression is a powerful Bayesian machine learning approach that can produce probabilistic predictions and avoid overfitting. The proposed method is tested with one simulated case study and with the Z24 Bridge SHM data. The second part concerns developing a regime-switching cointegration approach. Instead of modelling nonlinear cointegration as a smooth function, this part sees cointegration as a piecewise-linear function, which is triggered by some external variable. The model is trained with the aid of the augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test statistics. Two case studies are presented in this part, one simulated mulitidegree-of-freedom system, and also the Z24 Bridge data. The third part of this work introduces a cointegration method for heteroscedastic data. Heteroscedasticity, or time-dependent noise is often observed in SHM data, normally caused by seasonal variations. In order to address this issue, the TBATS (an acronym for key features of the model: Trigonometric, Box-Cox transformation, ARMA error, Trend, Seasonal components) model is employed to decompose the seasonal-corrupted time series, followed by conventional cointegration analysis. A simulated cantilever beam and real measurement data from the NPL Bridge are used to validate the proposed method

Closing the loop: the integration of long-term ambient vibration monitoring in structural engineering design

his study investigated the integration of long-term monitoring into the structural engineering design process to improve the design and operation of civil structures. A survey of civil and structural engineering professionals, conducted as part of this research, identified the cost and complexity of in-situ monitoring as key barriers to their implementation in practice. Therefore, the research focused on the use of ambient vibration monitoring as it is offers a low cost and unobtrusive method for instrumenting new and existing structures. The research was structured around the stages of analysing ambient vibration data using operational modal analysis (OMA), defined in this study as: i) pre-selection of analysis parameters, ii) pre-processing of the data, iii) estimation of the modal parameters, iv) identification of modes of vibration within the modal estimates, and v) using modal parameter estimates as a basis for understanding and quantifying in-service structural behaviour. A method was developed for automating the selecting of the model order, the number of modes of vibrations assumed to be identifiable within the measured dynamic response. This method allowed the modal estimates from different structures, monitoring periods or analysis parameters to be compared, and removed part of the subjectivity identified within current OMA methods. Pre-processing of ambient acceleration responses through filtering was identified as a source of bias within OMA modal estimates. It was shown that this biasing was a result of filtering artefacts within the processed data. Two methods were proposed for removing or reducing the bias of modal estimates induced by filtering artefacts, based on exclusion of sections of the response corrupted by the artefacts or fitting of the artefacts as part of the modal analysis. A new OMA technique, the short-time random decrement technique (ST-RDT) was developed on the basis of the survey of industry perceptions of long-term monitoring and limitations of existing structural monitoring techniques identified within the literature. Key advantages of the ST-RDT are that it allows the uncertainty of modal estimates and any changes in modal behaviour to be quantified through subsampling theory. The ST-RDT has been extensively validated with numerical, experimental and real-world case studies including multi-storey timber buildings and the world's first 3D printed steel bridge. Modal estimates produced using the ST-RDT were used as a basis for developing an automated method of identifying modes of vibration using a probabilistic mixture model. Identification of modes of vibration within OMA estimates was previously a specialized skill. The procedure accounts for the inherent noise associated with ambient vibration monitoring and allows the uncertainty within the modal estimates associated with each mode of vibration to be quantified. Methods of identifying, isolating and quantifying weak non-linear modal behaviour, changes in dynamic behaviour associated with changes in the distributions of mass or stiffness within a structure have been developed based on the fundamental equations of structural dynamics. These methods allow changes in dynamic behaviour associated with thermally-induced changes in stiffness or changes in static loading to be incorporated within the automated identification of modes of vibration. These methods also allow ambient vibration monitoring to be used for estimating structural parameters usually measured by more complex, expensive or delicate sensors. Examples of this include estimating the change in elastic modulus of simple structures with temperature or estimating the location and magnitude of static loads applied to a structure in-service. The methods developed in this study are applicable to a wide range of structural monitoring technologies, are accessible to non-specialist audiences and may be adapted for the monitoring of any civil structure

World Multidisciplinary Civil Engineering- Architecture- Urban Planning symposium

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all 900+ submissions by 600+ participants of WMCAUS 2018 from 60+ different countries all over the world for their interests and contributions in WMCAUS 2018. We wish you enjoy the World Multidisciplinary Civil Engineering-Architecture-Urban Planning Symposium – WMCAUS 2018 and have a pleasant stay in the city of romance Prague. We hope to see you again during next event WMCAUS 2019 which will be held in Prague (Czech Republic) approximately in the similar period

Divergence in Architectural Research

ConCave Ph.D. Symposium 2020: Divergence in Architectural Research, March 5-6, 2020, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA.The essays in this volume have come together under the theme “Divergence in Architectural Research” and present a snapshot of Ph.D. research being conducted in over thirty architectural research institutions, representing fourteen countries around the world. These essays also provide a window into the presentations and discussions that took place March 5-6, 2020, during the ConCave Ph.D. Symposium “Divergence in Architectural Research,” under the auspices of the School of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, Georgia. On a preliminary reading, the essays respond to the call of divergence by doing just that; they present the great diversity of research topics, methodologies, and practices currently found under the umbrella of “architectural research.” They inform inquiry within architectural programs and across disciplinary concentrations, and also point to the ways that the academy, research methodologies, and the design profession are evolving and encroaching upon one another, with the unspoken hope of encouraging new relationships, reconfiguring previous assumptions about the discipline, and interweaving research and practice