Research on Damage Detection of a 3D Steel Frame&#x0D; Model Using Smartphones

Botao Xie,Xuefeng Zhao,Jinke Li

doi:10.3390/s19030745

Abstract

Smartphones which are built into the suite of sensors, network transmission, data storage, and embedded processing capabilities provide a wide range of response measurement opportunities for structural health monitoring (SHM). The objective of this work was to evaluate and validate the use of smartphones for monitoring damage states in a three-dimensional (3D) steel frame structure subjected to shaking table earthquake excitation. The steel frame is a single-layer structure with four viscous dampers mounted at the beam-column joints to simulate different damage states at their respective locations. The structural acceleration and displacement responses of undamaged and damaged frames were obtained simultaneously by using smartphones and conventional sensors, while the collected response data were compared. Since smartphones can be used to monitor 3D acceleration in a given space and biaxial displacement in a given plane, the acceleration and displacement responses of the Y-axis of the model structure were obtained. Wavelet packet decomposition and relative wavelet entropy (RWE) were employed to analyze the acceleration data to detect damage. The results show that the acceleration responses that were monitored by the smartphones are well matched with the traditional sensors and the errors are generally within 5%. The comparison of the displacement acquired by smartphones and laser displacement sensors is basically good, and error analysis shows that smartphones with a displacement response sampling rate of 30 Hz are more suitable for monitoring structures with low natural frequencies. The damage detection using two kinds of sensors are relatively good. However, the asymmetry of the structure’s spatial stiffness will lead to greater RWE value errors being obtained from the smartphones monitoring data.

Highlights

A three-dimensional steel frame was subjected to shaking table tests simulating earthquake excitation
The response data of the undamaged structure and damaged structures were monitored using both conventional sensors and smartphones which were pre-installed with measurement acceleration (Orion-CC) and displacement (D-viewer) software
The data monitored by smartphones and conventional sensors were compared, and the causes of data errors were analyzed

Summary

Introduction

Structural health monitoring (SHM) technology has been successfully implemented to many structural applications and could be used to understand the environmental actions, loads, and behaviors of a structure subjected to various actions through solving a reverse problem, as well as to deduce structural safety and damage information using a measured structural response [1,2,3,4,5,6].With the development of structural health monitoring, wireless sensing technology that can wirelessly collect and transmit data has received more and more attention and will become an inevitable trend [7,8,9,10]. The form and configuration of conventional wireless sensors mainly include a data acquisition module, a microprocessor module, a wireless communication module, and an energy module. These sensors employ the collaborative work of each module to complete the monitoring task; the professional standards of these numerous modules and operations limit the generalization of their application. For this reason, the development of smartphones with a variety. With the embedment of a variety of different sensors into one single device to enable more applications, smartphones have been applied to human health monitoring [12], vehicle maintenance services [13], motion recognition [14], seismic sensing [15,16], and optical biosensing [17]

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Results

Conclusion