| An objective of the structural health monitoring system is to identify the state of the structure and to detect its damages after a major event, such as a strong earthquake. The ability to assess the state of the structure, including its damages, immediately after a severe event, will allow a rapid assessment of the civil infrastructures for the post-event emergency responses, rescues and management, to guarantee the safety operations of these structures. Hence, intensive research has been conducted for detecting structural damages based on vibration data measured from sensors. To date, unfortunately, practical and effective damage identification techniques based on the finite-element formulation remain to be developed for large-scale linear and nonlinear structures, in particular nonlinear hysteretic reinforced concrete (RC) structures.;The objective of this research is to develop an innovative, practical and efficient identification method based on the finite-element formulation, system condensation technique, and the event response data, such as the seismic response data, for applications to structural health monitoring systems. The innovative research will be capable of quantitatively determining the damage severity (time varying stiffness degradations) and locations of damages at element level. The developed new and efficient finite-element based methodology for structural damage detection would be: (1) applicable to linear and non-linear structures. (2) capable of identifying and tracking the structural damages using a minimum number of sensors, (3) capable of detecting local damages at element level, and (4) ready for practical applications to the health monitoring of complex structures.;In addition to the theoretical/numerical development, experimental test data using large-scale linear and nonlinear structures, i.e. 1/3-scaled two-story RC frame and 1/2-scaled one-story two-bay RC frame, obtained from the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE), Taiwan, will be used to verify the proposed innovative structural damage detection technique. |
