Abstract
Due to the long-term service, Chinese ancient timber buildings show varying degrees of wear. Thus, structural health monitoring (SHM) for these cultural and historical treasures is desperately needed to evaluate the service status. Although there are some FBG sensing-based SHM systems, they are not suitable for Chinese ancient timber buildings due to the differences in architectural types, structural loads, materials, and environment. Besides, a technical gap in Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensing-based column inclination monitoring exists. To overcome these weaknesses, this paper develops an FBG sensing-based structural health monitoring system for Chinese ancient Chuan-dou-type timber buildings that aims at monitoring structural deformation, i.e., beam deflection and column inclination, temperature, humidity, and fire around the building. An in-situ test and simulation analyses were conducted to verify the effectiveness of the developed SHM system. To validate the long-term-operation of the developed SHM system, monitoring data within 15 months were analyzed. The results show good agreement between the developed SHM system in this paper and other methods. In addition, the SHM system operated well in the first year after its deployment. This implies that the developed SHM system is applicable and effective in the health state monitoring of Chinese ancient Chuan-dou-type timber buildings, laying a foundation for damage prognosis of such types of timber buildings.
Highlights
In more than 5000 years of cultural inheritance, Chinese ancient timber buildings have become a symbol of China
After analyzing the above references, we find that most of the existing Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensing-based structural health monitoring (SHM) systems only focus on beam deformation monitoring
For the purpose of applying such a technique to actual engineering, this paper developed an SHM system based on the technique and applied it to the Seven Literary World, a typical two-story Chinese ancient Chuan-dou-type timber building in Fujian Province of China
Summary
In more than 5000 years of cultural inheritance, Chinese ancient timber buildings have become a symbol of China. Ancient timber buildings show varying degrees of wear due to the effects of long-term load, weather-beaten erosion, typhoons, and earthquakes. To ensure that these historical treasures continue to be safely used and permanently inherited, damage diagnosis allows no delay. After analyzing the above references, we find that most of the existing FBG sensing-based SHM systems only focus on beam deformation monitoring. The common deformation transformation algorithm of an FBG sensing-based SHM system, which may cause large measurement errors, is inactive for Chinese ancient timber buildings. To overcome the mentioned weaknesses, the authors developed a macroscopic deformation measurement technique for Chinese traditional timber buildings based on FBG sensors [23]. This work provides a new method for condition monitoring of Chinese ancient Chuan-dou-type timber buildings, laying a foundation for the damage prognosis of this type of building
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