Effects of environmental and operational variability on structural health monitoring

Author(s):  
Hoon Sohn

Stated in its most basic form, the objective of structural health monitoring is to ascertain if damage is present or not based on measured dynamic or static characteristics of a system to be monitored. In reality, structures are subject to changing environmental and operational conditions that affect measured signals, and these ambient variations of the system can often mask subtle changes in the system's vibration signal caused by damage. Data normalization is a procedure to normalize datasets, so that signal changes caused by operational and environmental variations of the system can be separated from structural changes of interest, such as structural deterioration or degradation. This paper first reviews the effects of environmental and operational variations on real structures as reported in the literature. Then, this paper presents research progresses that have been made in the area of data normalization.

2011 ◽  
Vol 368-373 ◽  
pp. 2402-2405
Author(s):  
Nai Zhi Zhao ◽  
Chang Tie Huang ◽  
Xin Chen

Many of the wave propagation based structural health monitoring techniques rely on some knowledge of the structure in a healthy state in order to identify damage. Baseline measurements are recorded when a structure is pristine and are stored for comparison to future data. A concern with the use of baseline subtraction methods is the ability to discern structural changes from the effects of varying environmental and operational conditions when analyzing the vibration response of a system. The use of a standard baseline subtraction technique may falsely indicate damage when environmental or operational variations are present between baseline measurements and new measurements. A procedure was outlined for the method, including excitation and recording of Lamb waves, and the use of damage detection algorithms. In this paper, several tests are performed and the results are used to help develop the damage detection algorithms previously described, and to evaluate the performance of the instantaneous baseline SHM technique. Analytical testing is first performed by feeding known input signals into each damage detection algorithm and analyzing the output data. The results of the analytical testing are used to help develop the damage detection algorithms.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 1107-1116
Author(s):  
Tingna Wang ◽  
David J. Wagg ◽  
Keith Worden ◽  
Robert J. Barthorpe

Abstract. Structural health monitoring (SHM) is often approached from a statistical pattern recognition or machine learning perspective with the aim of inferring the health state of a structure using data derived from a network of sensors placed upon it. In this paper, two SHM sensor placement optimisation (SPO) strategies that offer robustness to environmental effects are developed and evaluated. The two strategies both involve constructing an objective function (OF) based upon an established damage classification technique and an optimisation of sensor locations using a genetic algorithm (GA). The key difference between the two strategies explored here is in whether any sources of benign variation are deemed to be observable or not. The relative performances of both strategies are demonstrated using experimental data gathered from a glider wing tested in an environmental chamber, with the structure tested in different health states across a series of controlled temperatures.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 1716
Author(s):  
David Agis ◽  
Francesc Pozo

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the so-called parametric t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (P-t-SNE), comparing it to the performance of the t-SNE, the non-parametric version. The methodology used in this study is introduced for the detection and classification of structural changes in the field of structural health monitoring. This method is based on the combination of principal component analysis (PCA) and P-t-SNE, and it is applied to an experimental case study of an aluminum plate with four piezoelectric transducers. The basic steps of the detection and classification process are: (i) the raw data are scaled using mean-centered group scaling and then PCA is applied to reduce its dimensionality; (ii) P-t-SNE is applied to represent the scaled and reduced data as 2-dimensional points, defining a cluster for each structural state; and (iii) the current structure to be diagnosed is associated with a cluster employing two strategies: (a) majority voting; and (b) the sum of the inverse distances. The results in the frequency domain manifest the strong performance of P-t-SNE, which is comparable to the performance of t-SNE but outperforms t-SNE in terms of computational cost and runtime. When the method is based on P-t-SNE, the overall accuracy fluctuates between 99.5% and 99.75%.


2013 ◽  
Vol 390 ◽  
pp. 192-197
Author(s):  
Giorgio Vallone ◽  
Claudio Sbarufatti ◽  
Andrea Manes ◽  
Marco Giglio

The aim of the current paper is to explore fuselage monitoring possibilities trough the usage of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), trained by the use of numerical models, during harsh landing events. A harsh landing condition is delimited between the usual operational conditions and a crash event. Helicopter structural damage due to harsh landings is generally less severe than damage caused by a crash but may lead to unscheduled maintenance events, involving costs and idle times. Structural Health Monitoring technologies, currently used in many application fields, aim at the continuous detection of damage that may arise, thereby improving safety and reducing maintenance idle times by the disposal of a ready diagnosis. A landing damage database can be obtained with relatively little effort by the usage of a numerical model. Simulated data are used to train various ANNs considering the landing parameter values as input. The influence of both the input and output noise on the system performances were taken into account. Obtained outputs are a general classification between damaged and undamaged conditions, based on a critical damage threshold, and the reconstruction of the fuselage damage state.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 410-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrik Fröjd ◽  
Peter Ulriksen

Diffuse ultrasonic wave measurements used in structural health monitoring applications can detect damage in concrete. However, the accuracy is very susceptible to environmental variations. In this study, a large concrete floor slab was monitored using diffuse wave fields that were generated by continuous-wave transmissions between ultrasonic transducers. The slab was monitored for several weeks while being subjected to changes in environmental conditions. Subsequently, it was damaged using impact hits, resulting in centimeter-scale cracking. The variations caused by the environment masked the effects of the damage in the measurements. To address this issue, the Mahalanobis distance was used to distinguish between the influence of the damage and the influence of the environmental variations. The Mahalanobis model uses amplitude and phase measurements of continuous waves at a set of different frequencies as inputs. A moving window approach was applied to the baseline data set to account for slow trends. This study shows that this technique greatly suppresses most of the variations caused by environmental conditions. All damage events in our data set have been detected.


2012 ◽  
Vol 518 ◽  
pp. 289-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Mendrok ◽  
Tadeusz Uhl ◽  
Wojciech Maj ◽  
Paweł Paćko

The modal filter has various applications, among the others for damage detection. It was shown, that a structural modification (e.g. drop of stiffness due to a crack) causes an appearance of peaks on the output of the modal filter. This peaks result from not perfect modal filtration due to system local structural changes. That makes it a great indicator for damage detection, which has fallowing advantages: low computational afford due to the data reduction, the structural health monitoring system based on it, is easy to automate. Furthermore the system is theoretically insensitive to environmental changes as temperature or humidity variation (global structural changes do not cause a drop of modal filtration accuracy). In the paper the practical implementation of the presented technique is shown. The developed structural health monitoring (SHM) system is described as well as results of its extensive simulation and laboratory testing. Finally the application of the system for the structural changes detection on the airplane parts is presented..


Author(s):  
Elizabeth J. Cross ◽  
Keith Worden ◽  
Qian Chen

Before structural health monitoring (SHM) technologies can be reliably implemented on structures outside laboratory conditions, the problem of environmental variability in monitored features must be first addressed. Structures that are subjected to changing environmental or operational conditions will often exhibit inherently non-stationary dynamic and quasi-static responses, which can mask any changes caused by the occurrence of damage. The current work introduces the concept of cointegration , a tool for the analysis of non-stationary time series, as a promising new approach for dealing with the problem of environmental variation in monitored features. If two or more monitored variables from an SHM system are cointegrated, then some linear combination of them will be a stationary residual purged of the common trends in the original dataset. The stationary residual created from the cointegration procedure can be used as a damage-sensitive feature that is independent of the normal environmental and operational conditions.


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