A mission synthesis algorithm for fatigue damage analysis

This paper presents a signal processing based algorithm, the Mildly Nonstationary Mission Synthesis (MNMS), which produces a short mission signal from long records of experimental data. The algorithm uses the Discrete Fourier Transform, Orthogonal Wavelet Transform and bump reinsertion procedures. In order to observe the algorithm effectiveness a fatigue damage case study was performed for a vehicle lower suspension arm using signals containing tensile and compressive preloading. The mission synthesis results were compared to the original road data in terms of both the global signal statistics and the fatigue damage variation as a function of compression ratio. Three bump reinsertion methods were used and evaluated. The methods differed in the manner in which bumps (shock events) from different wavelet groups (frequency bands) were synchronised during the reinsertion process. One method, based on time synchronised section reinsertion, produced the best results in terms of mission signal kurtosis, crest factor, root-mean-square level and power spectral density. For improved algorithm performance, bump selection was identified as the main control parameter requiring optimisation

Seismic Risk Evaluation of R.C. Buildings in Japan Designated in Accordance with the 1990 AIJ Guidelines

National Science Foundation Grant BCS 91-06390Kajima Foundatio

State–of–the–art report on nonlinear representation of sources and channels

This report consists of two complementary parts, related to the modeling of two important sources of nonlinearities in a communications system. In the first part, an overview of important past work related to the estimation, compression and processing of sparse data through the use of nonlinear models is provided. In the second part, the current state of the art on the representation of wireless channels in the presence of nonlinearities is summarized. In addition to the characteristics of the nonlinear wireless fading channel, some information is also provided on recent approaches to the sparse representation of such channels

Fracture, Fatigue, and Structural Integrity of Metallic Materials and Components Undergoing Random or Variable Amplitude Loadings

Most metallic components and structures are subjected, in service, to random or variable amplitude loadings. There are many examples: vehicles subjected to loadings and vibrations caused by road irregularity and engine, structures exposed to wind, off-shore platforms undergoing wave-loadings, and so on. Just like constant amplitude loadings, random and variable amplitude loadings can make fatigue cracks initiate and propagate, even up to catastrophic failures. Engineers faced with the problem of estimating the structural integrity and the fatigue strength of metallic structures, or their propensity to fracture, usually make use of theoretical, numerical, or experimental approaches. This reprint collects a series of recent scientific contributions aimed at providing an up-to-date overview of approaches and case studies—theoretical, numerical or experimental—on several topics in the field of fracture, fatigue strength, and the structural integrity of metallic components subjected to random or variable amplitude loadings

Time-frequency Signature Sparse Reconstruction using Chirp Dictionary

This paper considers local sparse reconstruction of time-frequency signatures of windowed non-stationary radar returns. These signals can be considered instantaneously narrow-band, thus the local time-frequency behaviour can be recovered accurately with incomplete observations. The typically employed sinusoidal dictionary induces competing requirements on window length. It confronts converse requests on the number of measurements for exact recovery, and sparsity. In this paper, we use chirp dictionary for each window position to determine the signal instantaneous frequency laws. This approach can considerably mitigate the problems of sinusoidal dictionary, and enable the utilization of longer windows for accurate time-frequency representations. It also reduces the picket fence by introducing a new factor, the chirp rate . Simulation examples are provided, demonstrating the superior performance of local chirp dictionary over its sinusoidal counterpart

A Bayesian Augmented-Learning framework for spectral uncertainty quantification of incomplete records of stochastic processes

A novel Bayesian Augmented-Learning framework, quantifying the uncertainty of spectral representations of stochastic processes in the presence of missing data, is developed. The approach combines additional information (prior domain knowledge) of the physical processes with real, yet incomplete, observations. Bayesian deep learning models are trained to learn the underlying stochastic process, probabilistically capturing temporal dynamics, from the physics-based pre-simulated data. An ensemble of time domain reconstructions are provided through recurrent computations using the learned Bayesian models. Models are characterized by the posterior distribution of model parameters, whereby uncertainties over learned models, reconstructions and spectral representations are all quantified. In particular, three recurrent neural network architectures, (namely long short-term memory, or LSTM, LSTM-Autoencoder, LSTM-Autoencoder with teacher forcing mechanism), which are implemented in a Bayesian framework through stochastic variational inference, are investigated and compared under many missing data scenarios. An example from stochastic dynamics pertaining to the characterization of earthquake-induced stochastic excitations even when the source load data records are incomplete is used to illustrate the framework. Results highlight the superiority of the proposed approach, which adopts additional information, and the versatility of outputting many forms of results in a probabilistic manner

Simplified Chirp Dictionary for Time-Frequency Signature Sparse Reconstruction of Radar Returns

In sparse reconstruction of the Doppler frequency, the chirp atom approach has been shown to give a better performance than its sinusoidal counterpart. Nevertheless, the chirp atom has a relatively large dimension and so its computational load is much greater compared to the sinusoidal atom. In this paper, we propose a simplified chirp dictionary that obtains a satisfactory time-frequency signature approximation of the signals, but with a computational load comparable to the sinusoidal atom. We estimate the chirp rate through the DTFT of the bilinear product at a certain lag, and the initial frequency is solved in the time domain