Condition diagnostics of steel water tanks using correlated visual patterns

Insufficient, unreliable, and delayed condition assessment of steel water tanks is causing poor maintenance planning, wastes of maintenance resources, and unexpected structure failures. Visual inspection of water tanks heavily relies on engineers’ experiences for achieving comprehensive and reliable condition assessments. Recent studies reveal the potential of using imaging technology for improving the efficiency and comprehensiveness of capturing visual conditions of large civil infrastructures, but manual interpretation of imagery data still impedes engineers from reliable awareness of structural conditions. On the other hand, some studies show that deteriorations of structures result in correlated visual patterns that can assist engineers in structural diagnosis. The objective of the research presented in this paper is to examine correlated deformation patterns of a steel tank based on analyzing 3D laser-scanned point clouds collected in the field. Specifically, the authors aim at identifying correlated shape change patterns of a water tank through various 3D data analysis algorithms, and synthesize these 3D data patterns as knowledge for guiding data-driven condition assessment of the water tank. The authors examined two 3D data analysis approaches for revealing the deformation patterns of the studied tank. The first approach calculates the deviations of the 3D data points from as-designed shapes of the water tank for identifying structural deformation and defects. The second approach visualized anomalous variations in local shape descriptors, such as curvature, for identifying defects of structures. Correlations between the patterns could then reveal systematic changes of the tank for helping engineers conduct more reliable condition assessments.Non UBCUnreviewedFacultyOthe

Status quo and challenges and future development of fire emergency evacuation research and application in built environment

Fire emergency evacuation study has been conducted for decades. In recent two decades, the fire emergency evacuation studies have been incorporating new technologies due to the high demands on efficient and safe evacuation for occupants who have various needs. The proposed fire emergency evacuation system from academic research and solutions from industry practices adopt different technologies to serve various evacuees. Therefore, this study conducts literature review to understand the status quo of current fire emergency evacuation research and practice. It shows that fire emergency evacuation studies mainly focus on the facility operation stage instead of design and construction stages. The facilities include residential buildings, education buildings, subways, shopping centers, etc. Three critical factors affect efficient and safe fire emergency evacuation in a built environment – facility physical features, fire characteristics, and human behavior. This study categories these new technologies, which are incorporated into the fire emergency evacuation research and practices within the recent two decades, into four groups: (1) Facility geometrical analysis, which includes the technologies such as BIM, GIS, VR and the combination of BIM/GIS/VR (2) Fire and smoke simulation, e.g. FDS and Pyrosim. The simulation output such as fire and smoke dynamics is incorporated into intelligent fire evacuation system (3) Crowd evacuation simulation software, e.g. Pathfinder, Massmotion; the output of simulation is used to develop personalized evacuation system (4) Indoor positioning system and mobile device/IoT technology to track and evacuate occupants intelligently. This study presents these new technologies used in thefire emergency evacuation systems and indicates that the development of an intelligent and personalized emergency evacuation system, which may track the evacuees in real time, is the future research trend.This article is published as Jiang, Aiyin, Yunjeong Mo, and Vamsi Sai Kalasapudi. "Status quo and challenges and future development of fire emergency evacuation research and application in built environment." Journal of Information Technology in Construction 27 (2022). doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.36680/j.itcon.2022.038. COPYRIGHT: © 2022 The author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)