Abstract
Buildings, bridges, towers, tunnels, dams, and retaining walls are susceptible to damage from extreme loads such as wind, floods, fires, earthquakes, undermining from adjacent construction, landslides, and overloading with heavy contents. Moreover, those structures can suffer long-term damage if their strength is allowed to deteriorate gradually over time. In the past few decades, Structural Health Monitoring and Integrity Management (SHMIM), which can mitigate high repair costs by continuously measuring and detecting damaging phenomena as they occur, has become a vital tool to help civil engineers improve the safety and maintainability of critical infrastructures. Just in last few years, lots of SHMIM systems have been devised, implemented, and operated worldwide, especially in China, to monitor the structural performance and operational condition of various types of engineering structures under their in-service life.
Considering significant progress gained in the general field SHMIM in China, a mini-symposium on “Distributed Sensor Networks for Structural Health Monitoring: Chinese Experience” was organized during the 7th International Conference on Structural Health Monitoring of Intelligent Infrastructure (SHMII-7), held in Torino, Italy, on 1–3 July 2015. This mini-symposium successfully aggregated the latest research efforts contributing to theoretical, methodological, and technological advances in the integration of various aspects of SHMIM applications from professionals within a broad range of disciplines. More than 50 scholars were attracted to share their ideas and application experiences at the mini-symposium. In view of a number of high-quality presentations delivered, the organizers of the mini-symposium proposed organizing a special issue in Advances in Structural Engineering, an international journal, and this proposal was accepted by the Editors-in-Chief of the journal.
A total of 10 technical papers are included in this Special Issue after rigorous peer reviews. The first four papers focus on the research pertaining to innovative monitoring technologies for infrastructures. In the paper “Impact localization by a multi-radio sink based WSN for large scale structures” by Ren et al., the authors develop a wireless multi-radio sink which can access multiple communication channels and be adopted to build and impact monitoring wireless sensor network. Besides, a corresponding network architecture with an energy-weighted factor-based localization method adopted is also presented to enable impact localization within the whole monitoring scope of the network. The paper “Experimental investigations on seismic damage monitoring of concrete dams using distributed PZT sensor network” by Zhang et al. presents a novel seismic damage detection system for seismic damage monitoring in concrete dams, which has many advantages over the traditional one of using accelerometers, such as high signal-to-noise ratio, wide frequency response, good sensitivity of initial damage, and access to the stress history. The paper “Distributed monitoring method for upheaval buckling in subsea pipelines with BOTDA sensors” by Feng et al. introduces a method for monitoring the upheaval buckling of subsea buried pipelines by distributed optical fiber sensors. In the paper “Structural displacement and strain monitoring based on edge detection operator” by Lu et al., the authors investigate a edge detection operator based on multi-scale structure elements and compound mathematical morphological operator for better image feature extraction. The proposed method can not only obtain better filtering effect and anti-noise ability but also detect the edge more accurately.
The remaining six papers in the Special Issue are focused on the topics of feature extraction, system identification, and damage detection. In the paper “A generalized Pareto distribution-based extreme value model of thermal gradients in a long-span bridge combining parameter updating” by Zhou et al., the authors develop a generalized Pareto distribution (GPD)-based extreme value model combining parameter updating for describing the statistical characteristics of thermal gradients in a long-span bridge. The paper “Evolutionary power spectral density analysis on the wind-induced buffeting responses of Sutong Bridge during Typhoon Haikui” by Tao et al. analyzes the buffeting responses of Sutong Bridge during Typhoon Haikui in 2012 recorded by Structural Health Monitoring System to represent the non-stationary characteristics. The results of this paper exhibit that it is essential to incorporate the non-stationary features of winds in the analysis or design of long-span bridges from an aerodynamic viewpoint. In the paper “Comfort assessment for a pedestrian passageway suspended under a girder bridge with random traffic flows” by Chen et al., a novel method is proposed for probability-based vibration comfort assessment, which considers the randomness of traffic flows. The paper “A Monitoring-Mining-Modeling (MMM) system and its application to the temperature status of the Xiluodu Arch Dam” by Hu et al. proposes a MMM system which includes an in-situ monitoring network setup, data mining methods, and numerical finite element analysis for studying the thermal state of a super high-arch dam in China. The paper “Experimental and numerical studies on a test method for damage diagnosis of stay cables” by An et al. validates a model-free frequency-change-based damage diagnosis method for stay cables with the use of a temporary diagonal steel bar. The paper “Damage Identification using structural modes based on substructure virtual distortion method” by Zhang et al. presents a damage identification approach using Substructure Virtual Distortion Method (SVDM) which takes the advantage of the fast structural reanalysis technique of VDM.
The Guest Editors of this Special Issue are grateful to the authors for their preparation of the extended papers and to the reviewers for providing high-quality and timely reviews. The Guest Editors would also like to thank Profs Jin-Guang Teng and Yong Xia, the Editors-in-Chief of the international journal, Advances in Structural Engineering, for their kind guidance and support leading to success of this Special Issue. This meaningful work was partially supported by the 973 Program (grant no. 2015CB060000), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 51421064 and 51478081), the Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars of Dalian (grant no. 2015J12JH209), and the Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities (grant no. DUT16LAB07).