An Introduction to Structural Health Monitoring

Abstract

Structural health monitoring of civil structures is a great necessity for every society due to the key importance of health monitoring of valuable and critical civil structures in order to prevent economic and human losses caused by damage occurrence. This chapter of the book introduces the background and motivation of this process, the main levels and methods of structural health monitoring. Due to advances in sensing and data acquisition systems, data-driven methods have become increasingly popular among civil engineers and researchers owing to simplicity, robustness, and computational efficiency. Data-driven methods are generally based on statistical pattern recognition paradigm. Therefore, the main steps of this paradigm and the concepts of machine learning are clarified in this chapter. One of the major challenging issues in structural health monitoring is environmental and operational variability conditions. Therefore, a part of this chapter is devoted to these conditions and their negative influences. Finally, the aim and scope of this book are highlighted at the end of this chapter.