Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics

Seminar Announcement

Friday, September 18th, 2015

CE 201

12:00pm – 1:00pm

Challenges in Structural Health Assessment

Dr. Abdullah Al-Hussein

Lecturer, Civil Engineering Department, University of Basrah, Iraq

Abstract

Structural health assessment (SHA) has become one of the urgent research topics all over the world. Because of deterioration of civil infrastructures and lack of funds to replace them within a short period of time, extending their life without exposing public to excessive risk has become an attractive option. Civil infrastructures are expected to deteriorate with time and continuously accumulate damage during normal operation due to natural aging process, harsh environmental conditions, and often inadequate maintenance. They also deteriorate when exposed to natural hazards like earthquakes, high winds, and so on or man-made events like blast, explosion, and so on. Furthermore, some of them are over their design lives. Based on the statistics of 2013 by the U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration, more than 30% of existing bridges have exceeded their 50-year design life. And based on the ASCE’s 2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, the nation’s infrastructure received an overall grade of D+, and estimated investment needed to bring them up to the current standard would be about $3.6 trillion by 2020.

The structural damage is necessary to be detected at the earliest possible stage in order to ensure the serviceability and safety of the structure. However, at present we do not have well accepted inspection procedures to objectively detect locations and severity of defect spots. There are several challenges needed to be overcome in order to make the inspection procedures implementable. In this presentation, a novel unscented Kalman filter technique for structural health assessment using minimum information will be presented. The procedure is vibration-based system identification technique. The finite element is used to represent the structure in order to identify the locations and severity of defects at the local element level. The drawback in available approaches and the challenges faced in developing the novel technique will be emphasized.

All are welcome!