New Trends in Vibration Based Structural Health Monitoring
September 22, 2008 — September 26, 2008
Coordinators:
- Keith Worden (University of Sheffield, Sheffield, Great Britain)
- Arnaud Deraemaeker (Free University of Brussels, Bruxelles, Belgium)
Vibration based Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has been extensively studied over the last 20 years as an alternative to the current costly scheduled visual inspections. Most of these studies were an extension of the traditional methods of modal identification and finite element model updating methods relying on the state-of-the-art of instrumentation around the 80’s (typically a few accelerometers attached to the structure).
Today, with the aging of buildings, bridges and aircrafts, the demand for reliable and robust SHM systems is still important. At the same time, in the last ten years, there have been tremendous improvements in different fields of engineering which open new avenues for vibration based SHM: new types of possibly wireless and embedded sensors have become available capable of measuring new types of quantities (towards the concept of ‘Smart Dust’), increased computational power, data rate transfers and data storage allowing the use of very large networks of sensors, novel techniques in the field of data mining and artificial intelligence for data processing.
With these technological advances, monitoring structures in real time using very large networks of sensors is becoming a reality. In practice however, the engineers lack efficient tools to process the huge amount of available data. In addition, the structures to be monitored are subject to changing environmental conditions which may cause false alarms in the monitoring systems if nothing is done in order to remove those effects.
The course is intended to give an overview of future trends in SHM, including sensors, hardware for acquisition, software and methodologies. Important issues such as data reduction in large sensor networks, feature extraction from ambient vibration measurements, effects of the environment, statistical analysis tools and damage modelling will be adressed. Practical applications in civil, mechanical and aerospace engineering will be presented in order to show the degree of maturity of SHM techniques in these different fields.