Damage identification of a single RC column subjected to barge impact based on optimization strategies

Abstract

The safety of civil structures e.g. bridges and frame buildings are threatened by various inevitable hazards such as corrosion, fatigue and extreme loading e.g. earthquake, blast, impact. Such hazards may cause significant damage to structures and hence reduce their performance. This paper proposes two different strategies, i.e. the direct identification method which assumes that the information of loading which causes damage to a structure is not known and the indirect identification method which assumes that the loading causing structural damage is known to be generated by certain scenarios e.g. impact to identify the damage of civil structures after certain loading processes. Barge impact upon a single reinforced concrete (RC) column is considered in this paper to assess the prediction quality of the proposed strategies by comparing the identified damage quantities to the benchmark output data generated by an exact deformation analysis using the previously developed coupled multi-degree-of-freedom model (CMM). The proposed strategies show great potential for practical applications to damage identification of civil structures.