Abstract
Natural disasters and the poor management of civil engineering structures and infrastructures require timely action and new tools such as specially designed structural health monitoring platforms. This paper proposes an innovative platform based on a network of wirelessly connected, low-power, and renewable-energy-fed sensor units. The platform is a multipurpose tool for diagnostics, maintenance, and supervision, capable of simultaneously carrying out damage detection, localization, identification, and “multiclass” and “multi-material” level quantification of different types of failures. In addition, it works as a decision support tool for emergency management and post-disaster assessment, here tailored for an Italian theme park. The platform uses innovative algorithms based on the concept of the vibro-acoustic signature of the asset monitored. The vibro-acoustic signatures of the monitored assets are gathered by the microphones and accelerometers of the platform’s sensor units. Then, almost simultaneously, they are analyzed using specifically designed wavelet-based and convolutional-neural-network-based algorithms, which are able to extract crucial information about the structural and environmental conditions of both the asset and the areas of the thematic park. In addition, the platform shows escape routes during an emergency, indicating meeting points and helping people to proceed safely along a recognizable escape route to a safe place, as demonstrated by the simulations.
Highlights
Emergencies caused by interaction between catastrophic and accidental natural events, such as earthquakes, sudden floods or fires, and deficiencies in appropriate management activities, increasingly affect structures and infrastructures.On the one hand, in order to manage these particular events, a high level of attention should be paid during the design and management of the abovementioned assets
Despite the high number of nondestructive tests (NDTs)-structural health monitoring (SHM) solutions proposed in recent years, none of these has a sufficient level of development that allows for performing, at the same time, damage detection, location, type identification, and level quantification
In the study presented here, we propose an innovative NDT-SHM platform, specially designed to be implemented in a theme park and aimed at providing crucial information on the structural health status of the various types of structures
Summary
Emergencies caused by interaction between catastrophic and accidental natural events, such as earthquakes, sudden floods or fires, and deficiencies in appropriate management activities, increasingly affect structures and infrastructures. Despite the high number of NDT-SHM solutions proposed in recent years, none of these has a sufficient level of development that allows for performing, at the same time, damage detection, location, type identification, and level quantification (i.e., all the purposes of the SHM; see [14]) They cannot be defined as “multiclass” or “multi-material”, i.e., they are not able to monitor different types of failures (e.g., delamination and vertical cracks, or concealed and surface, etc., [15,16]) or materials (e.g., asphalt concrete and cement concrete; see [4]). It strongly complies with the Italian regional project SICURVIA (in progress)
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