An intelligent health monitoring method for processing data collected from the sensor network of structure

Abstract

Rapid detection of damages in civil engineering structures, in order to assess their possible disorders and as a result produce competent decision making, are crucial to ensure their health and ultimately enhance the level of public safety. In traditional intelligent health monitoring methods, the features are manually extracted depending on prior knowledge and diagnostic expertise. Inspired by the idea of unsupervised feature learning that uses artificial intelligence techniques to learn features from raw data, a two-stage learning method is proposed here for intelligent health monitoring of civil engineering structures. In the first stage, Nystrom method is used for automatic feature extraction from structural vibration signals. In the second stage, Moving Kernel Principal Component Analysis (MKPCA) is employed to classify the health conditions based on the extracted features. In this paper, KPCA has been implemented in a new form as Moving KPCA for effectively segmenting large data and for determining the changes, as data are continuously collected. Numerical results revealed that the proposed health monitoring system has a satisfactory performance for detecting the damage scenarios of a three-story frame aluminum structure. Furthermore, the enhanced version of KPCA methods exhibited a significant improvement in sensitivity, accuracy, and effectiveness over conventional methods.