Cost-effective Rehabilitation of Civil Infrastructure using Limited Sensors

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Even the best-designed, most carefully built structures, such as buildings and bridges, eventually weaken. Whether a structure fails over time due to environmental conditions or use, or suddenly, because of a natural disaster such as an earthquake or strong wind, failure has significant human and societal consequences. Detecting damage while a structure is in use both helps avoid safety risks and minimizes the economic costs of suspending access to assess damage. Recently, vibration based damage detection (VBDD) methods, an offshoot of structural health monitoring, have shown promise in efforts to rehabilitate civil infrastructure. In VBDD, the presence of damage and its severity in a structure is assessed through detecting unusual symptoms in vibration measurements, and then rehabilitation is undertaken using appropriate decision making tools. However, because of the high cost of sensors and their installation issues, it is not always feasible to install sensors at every critical location in a large-scale structure. The proposed research will develop smart and cost-effective technology to perform early damage diagnosis and rehabilitation using limited numbers of vibration sensors. Current tools for damage detection and maintenance use a wide range of signal processing methods. Recent development of blind source separation (BSS) by the applicant as a powerful class of signal decomposition methods makes them a promising candidate for VBDD. Recently, BSS has been successfully demonstrated in linear structures in a wide range of challenging situations. In the proposed research, BSS algorithms will be expanded to develop sophisticated damage detection algorithms for deteriorating (i.e., nonlinear) structures using a fewer number of vibration measurements. Various decision making approaches, relating to sensor densities, distributed sensing, optimal sensor placement, retro-fitting and control strategies, will be considered. These algorithms will result in cost-effective rehabilitation and technology-enabled maintenance of deteriorating civil structures. Such a multidisciplinary research and development will advance efforts to attain sustainable and resilient infrastructure. Researchers and students will develop diverse skills and experience in fields such as structural engineering, mechanical engineering, systems design and decision analysis. This program will develop several research projects with a tangible impact on the smart infrastructure community.