Chapter 1 Introduction

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Introduction
Current trend of Damage Assessment in Civil Engineering Structures
It is widely recognized that damage assessment of civil engineering structures is crucial for emergency relief and long term deterioration. Accurate damage assessment of civil engineering structures has been received many attentions from civil engineering society. This is because the awareness of the importance of assessing defects as early as possible for the safety of civil engineering structures. If damage remains undetected, the damage could progressively increase and causes the structures an ultimately fail. Also, there have been increased economic and social demands to periodically monitor and evaluate the safety of civil engineering structures against long term damage like, corrosion, deterioration, and short term damage like after extreme events such as earthquake, flood, tornado, etc. The term damage may be defined as changes in the material and/or geometric properties of structures, the boundary conditions, system connectivity, etc (Stinemates, Farrar et al. 2002). These changes are caused by various reasons like cracks, loose bolts, broken welds, corrosion, fatigue, and so on. Visual inspections or Non-Destructive Tests (NDT) such as X-ray

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radiography, infrared thermography, ultrasonic spectroscopy, acoustic holography, etc are transitional methods to identify/assess those damages. Depending on the results from those methods, cost associated with the maintenance and repair works would be properly programmed. However, those conventional damage detection/assessment methods have clear limitations. Such that even though visual inspection has been the most common method employed in detecting damage in engineering structures, it is time-consuming and often does not yield quantifiable results, and some components are virtually impossible for visual inspections. In other words, it is not adequate to identify damage, as they are invisible to human eyes (Huelmtad and S.Shin 1996). NDT methods are well developed and can give very accurate information on the type and extent of certain damage. However, there are some drawbacks with these methods such that they often require the exact location of the damage and the portion of the structure being inspected. This means that the location of damage should be known a prior to inspection, because these methods are only possible to perform on the limited area and limited accessibility. In addition, these damage assessment methods are performed the specific scheduled time and they are time-consuming, labour-intensive, and very expensive to perform the whole affected area. One common approach not only to mitigate these problems but also to quantify the amount of damage is to monitor the modal parameters of the structure since they provide a global/local way to access the structural state (Saitoh and Takei. B.T 1996). This is because modal parameters such as frequencies, mode shapes, and modal damping are functions of the physical properties of a structure, and change in the modal parameters leads to change in the physical properties such as stiffness, mass and damping. The modal parameters can be extracted through

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vibration signals of a structure, when excited by either ambient or artificially applied forces. Therefore, the VBDA (Vibration Based Damage Assessment) can be used to identify the location of and/or the severity of damage in engineering structures through forced or ambient vibration test (Doebling, Farrar et al. 1996). Among various VBDA methods, which have been developed for dealing with detection of the damage location and assessment of the damage extents, Finite Model (FE) updating methods has been rapidly developed and applied for damage detection/assessment in civil engineering structures, since they correlate the measured modal parameters with analytical FE model to detect/assess the damage, according to Xia and Hao (2003). In this study, damage assessment using FE model updating, which belongs to the model-based methods, is the prime methodology, because an adequate FE model is able to predict/assess changes in the observed model by modifying/adjusting updating parameters in a structure (Teughels and De Roeck 2004).

Problem Statement for VBDA Methods using FE model updating

Existing VBDA methods using FE model updating have been originally developed in the field of aerospace industry, so that they may not fully address the issues that arise in the civil engineering structures, where face with various uncertain environmental conditions in measuring vibration data of a structure and FE modelling. Therefore, when measuring vibration data from the civil engineering structures, the expected results of modal parameters do not coincide with those from FE model. The problem of how to modify the FE model using the measured vibration data is the main challenges for the development of the conventional FE model updating methods for damage assessment of engineering structures. The followings are the main challenges for the development of the robust and accurate FE

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model updating methods for damage assessment in civil engineering structures. 1. Errors associated with the measurement of vibration signals from the civil engineering structures may not be included to FE model updating for damage assessment. These errors may lead to the biased damage identification result even when the estimation of the modal parameters is near perfect. 2. Civil engineering structures generally display extremely complicated geometry and consist of various materials such as steel, concrete, cable, etc. These materials also involve many uncertainties in the estimation of structural parameters. These issues make the accurate FE modelling of civil engineering structures almost impossible. In addition, FE modelling process also involves many assumptions and judgements during modelling procedure. However, FE model updating method assumes that the model form is perfect, and any discrepancies in analytical model is due to the damage in measured model. It causes unrealistic damage assessment results. Therefore, these errors should be investigated in the updating process but ignored in the most model updating literatures (Teughels, Maeck et al. 2001). 3. Measurements are also incomplete in both a modal and spatial sense. Responses of vibration data from a real structure contains modally and spatially incomplete as the responses are only obtained at limited points with a few modes, which may lead one of the main problems to determine the locations and severity of damage. The size of engineering structures does not permit the instrumentation of a large number of sensors. In fact, only a small number of measurement points and a few fundamental modes would be available Therefore, FE model updating methods for damage assessments would suffer from lack of data. (Denoyer and Peterson 1996).

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4. For the purpose of damage assessment, the modal parameters should be sensitive enough to assess even slight local changes in a civil engineering structure. However, many literatures indicates that natural frequency and mode shapes are not sensitive enough to find the local changes in a civil engineering structure (Jaishi and Ren 2006).

Objectives
This study is intended to tackle aforementioned problems, and to develop a statistical FE model updating using the flexibility residual for probabilistic damage assessment. Challenge is to assess damage in terms of probability through the statistical distribution of structural parameters. Particularly, a perturbation based statistical approach is employed in order to derive the statistical distribution of the updating parameters from the FE model and the measured modal parameters. Then, the derived statistical distributions of the updating parameters of the undamaged and possibly damaged structures are used to compute the probability that damage in any substructure exceeds any threshold specified in terms of a local loss of stiffness. Extensive numerical simulations, benchmark study, experimental applications presented and several VBDA methods are compared to evaluate accuracy and robustness of the proposed method. Therefore, the objectives of this thesis are:

To develop a statistical FE model updating for probabilistic damage assessment, considering uncertainties caused by measurement noise and natural variability in material properties.

To develop a statistical FE model updating for probabilistic damage assessment, considering the cases when a small number of degrees of freedom are measured and a few modes are estimated.

Instead of comparing relative changes in updating parameters before and after damage, to

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compute the probability of damage that an updating parameter exceeds a certain damage fraction.

To develop a statistical FE model updating method, even when damage occurs progressively in a structure, i.e., degradation damage, fatigue, deterioration, etc.

Overview of the Proposed Methodology

Fig 1.1 shows the schematic diagram of the statistical FE model updating with the dynamically measured flexibility for probabilistic damage assessment. The proposed methodology can be outlined as follows:
1. Modal analysis of undamaged model: extracting undamaged modal parameters through

forced or ambient vibration tests.

2. Initial FE modelling: the initial FE model is built to match the measured modal

parameters of the undamaged model to the extracted modal parameters as closely as possible. This FE model is done to improve the ability to predict the response of the structure.
3. Initial FE model updating: initial FE model updating is the process to refine the initial

FE model with the measured modal parameters. In other words, this process is utilizing the measured modal parameters into the analytical FE model. 4. Modal analysis of damaged model: extracting (possibly) damaged modal parameters through forced or ambient vibration tests.
5. FE model updating for damage assessment: this FE model updating is the process to

assess damage in a structure using the (possibly) damaged modal parameters in terms of changing in the updating parameters.
6. Statistical damage assessment: computing statistics of the updating parameters

considering measurement noise and FE modelling error.

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7. Probabilistic damage assessment: identifying the probability of damage that any

substructure exceeds a certain damage fraction using statistics of the updating parameters.
8. Report and continuous updating: the probabilities of damage are continuously updated

when new data are obtained from the structure.

(1) Initial analytical modelling Undamaged structure

(2) Modal analysis -Considering measurement noise

(3) Initial FE model updating - Considering modelling error

Damage incidences & Long term deterioration

Damaged structure
(4) Modal analysis -Considering measurement noise

(5) FE model updating - Assessing damage in a structure in terms of the updating parameters

(6) Statistical damage assessment - Updating statistics of stiffness parameter

(7) Probabilistic damage assessment - Predict the location and severity of damage in terms of probability

(8) Report the probability of damage of any substructure

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Fig 1.1 A framework of the Proposed Methodology

Organization of Thesis
The thesis is organized in the following manner, Chapter 2 provides an extensive review of VBDA methods, focusing on FE model updating method, statistical and probabilistic approach. Chapter 3 describes the theoretical development of the proposed statistical FE model updating with the flexibility residuals for probabilistic damage assessment. This chapter presents damage assessment results of numerical simulation using cantilever model which show that accurate damage assessment are achieved when measurements are perfect and FE model form is exact with the measured model. Chapter 3 also investigates the effect of level of random error in the measurement noise and natural variability in material properties, modal and spatial incompleteness of the measured modal parameters, and multiple damage locations and the severity of damage into the proposed algorithm. Chapter 4 describes the application of the proposed method to a benchmark structure simulated by Johnson et al. (2004). This chapter is focused on the issue of the proposed method using a simplified analytical model instead of using a full DOFs model. It is demonstrated that the proposed method shows that obtained results are capable of accurately estimating damages using the simplified model with modally and spatially incomplete modal parameters. In additions, as the proposed method is a statistical approach, it is compared with another statistical approach, namely, a Bayesian approach for damage assessment method. Lastly, chapter 5 presents results of the proposed method using experimental vibration measurement, which were conducted by R. Voltis (2008) at the University of Surrey, for damage

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assessment. The damage is induced by progressively reducing the attached GFRP plates at the centre of the beam. Non-model based method along with the proposed method is compared to distinguish the features of the proposed method, which is model-based method, with respect to continuous monitoring of damage. The results show that incorporating non-model based method into the proposed method (model-based method) can lead to improve prediction of damage and lower bounds on the updating uncertainties. Finally, Chapter 6 contains a summary of important results and conclusions, along with suggestions for future work.

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References
Denoyer, K. K. and L. D. Peterson (1996). Structural model updating using dynamically measured static flexibility matrices. College of Engineering, University of Colorado. Doebling, S., C. R. Farrar, et al. (1996). Damage Identification and Health Monitoring of Structural and Mechanical Systems from Changes in Their Vibration Characteristics: a literature review. Los Alamos, Los Alamos National Laboratory. Huelmtad, K. D. and S.Shin (1996). "Crack identification in a cantilever beam from modal response." Journal of Sound and Vibration 198: 527-545. Jaishi, B. and W.-X. Ren (2006). "Damage detection by finite element model updating using modal flexibility residual." Journal of Sound and Vibration 290(1-2): 369-387. Johnson, E. A., H. F. Lam, et al. (2004). "Phase I IASC-ASCE Structural Health Monitoring Benchmark Problem Using Simulated Data." Journal of Engineering Mechanics 130(1): 3-15. Saitoh, M. and Takei. B.T (1996). Damage Estimation and Identification of Structural Faults Using Modal Parameters. 14th International Modal Analysis Conference, Dearborn. MI. Sohn, H. and H. K. Law (2000). "Bayesian probabilistic damage detection of a reinforced-concrete bridge column." Earthquake Engineering & Structural Dynamics 29(8): 1131-1152. Stinemates, D. W., C. R. Farrar, et al. (2002). "Structural health monitoring system design using finite element analysis." PROC SPIE INT SOC OPT. ENG 4702: 169-178. Teughels, A. and G. De Roeck (2004). "Structural Damage Identification of the Highway Bridge Z24 by FE model Updating." Journal of Sound and Vibration(278): 589-610. Teughels, A., J. Maeck, et al. (2001). A finite element model updating method using experimental modal parameters applied on a railway bridge. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Aided Optimum Design of Structures, Bologna, Italy.

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Votsis, R. A. (2008). Vibration Assessment of FRP Composite Pedestrian Bridges. Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences. Guildford, University of Surrey.

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