Abstract
Structural health monitoring technologies have provided extensive methods to sense the stress of steel structures. However, monitored stress is a relative value rather than an absolute value in the structure’s current state. Among all the stress measurement methods, ultrasonic methods have shown great promise. The shear-wave amplitude spectrum and phase spectrum contain stress information along the propagation path. In this study, the influence of uniaxial stress on the amplitude and phase spectra of a shear wave propagating in steel members was investigated. Furthermore, the shear-wave amplitude spectrum and phase spectrum were compared in terms of characteristic frequency (CF) collection, parametric calibration, and absolute stress measurement principles. Specifically, the theoretical expressions of the shear-wave amplitude and phase spectra were derived. Three steel members were used to investigate the effect of the uniaxial stress on the shear-wave amplitude and phase spectra. CFs were extracted and used to calibrate the parameters in the stress measurement formula. A linear relationship was established between the inverse of the CF and its corresponding stress value. The test results show that both the shear-wave amplitude and phase spectra can be used to evaluate uniaxial stress in structural steel members.
Highlights
Compared to our previous work [24], which aimed to measure the absolute stress using the shear-wave amplitude spectrum, this paper further studies the phase spectrum of a shear wave propagating in steel members
The difference between the two methods is that the stress exerts a direct influence on the amplitude spectrum, while the effect of stress on the phase spectrum is difficult to observe, and the characteristic frequency (CF) is extracted from the DPD curve
Three steel members were used to study the effect of the applied uniaxial stress on the amplitude spectrum and phase spectrum
Summary
Many large-scale steel structures have been built worldwide due to their high degree of industrialization [1,2]. Structural health monitoring [6,7] is one of the most effective technologies to sense the real response of the monitored objects. Existing stress measurement methods, such as diffraction [17,18] and magnetic methods [19], can be used to detect the absolute stress of materials. These methods are unable to adequately test large-scale steel members and are unsuitable for field applications because a strict testing environment is required during the testing process. Absolute stress measurements of structural steel members using structural health monitoring technologies remains a challenging task [20,21]
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