Abstract
The increasing development of large-scale and complex civil infrastructure, such as long-span bridges and high-rise buildings, needs huge investment and is critical to the economy of highly urbanized cities in Mainland China. The exposure of civil infrastructure to natural and man-made hazards may cause structural degradation or damage. If the accumulated damage cannot be detected in a timely manner, structural safety will be threatened, and the damage may lead to partial or even total collapse of a structure, resulting in huge economic loss and fatalities. To prevent and mitigate disasters, innovative technologies in disaster prevention and mitigation have attracted significant research efforts worldwide, and many new technologies have been developed to cope with engineering problems that are encountered in the design, analysis, operation, and maintenance of complex civil facilities.
For the exchange of the latest achievements in this field, the Second Young Scholar Symposium on Disaster Prevention and Mitigation in Civil Engineering (YSSCE-2) was held at Wuhan University of Technology, Hubei, China on 20–22 November 2015 after the first successful YSSCE-1 in Xiamen, Fujian, China, in 2013. The symposium offers an excellent platform to address technological developments in disaster prevention and mitigation engineering for civil infrastructure from the theoretical, numerical, experimental, and practical aspects. A total of 28 speakers from 20 universities in Hong Kong, Australia, and Mainland China were invited to present their research activities in the field. These papers covered the following topics in disaster prevention and mitigation: (1) structural health monitoring, (2) structural vibration control, (3) smart materials and structures, (4) earthquake engineering and wind engineering, (5) theories and methods of structural analysis, and (6) structural rehabilitation, retrofitting, and strengthening.
In view of numerous high-quality presentations delivered at the symposium, a special issue on “Advanced Technologies in Disaster Prevention and Mitigation” was organized in Advances in Structural Engineering (ASE). This Special Issue contains nine selected papers of the Second YSSCE on different aspects of disaster prevention and mitigation. Four studies on the vibration control and energy dissipation of civil engineering structures, which were subjected to various external excitations, were conducted. Four studies focused on the broad area of structural health monitoring with developments of innovative algorithms. One study investigated the general wind characteristics of bridges. These papers represent the latest advancement of young scholars in disaster prevention and mitigation of civil infrastructure.
The paper titled “Experimental Study and Finite Element Analysis of Energy Dissipating Outriggers” by Yang et al. investigated the structural responses and the energy dissipation capacities of three different outriggers through experimental studies and finite element analysis. The paper titled “A Hybrid Approach for Parameter Optimization of Multiple Tuned Mass Dampers in Reducing Floor Vibrations Due to Occupant Walking: Theory and Parametric Studies” by Xu et al. proposed a hybrid approach for determining optimal parameters of multiple tuned mass dampers to reduce floor vibration caused by human walking based on a partial mode decomposition algorithm and an adaptive genetic simulated annealing method. Moreover, the paper titled “Fragility Analysis of Self-centering Prestressed Concrete Bridge Pier with External Aluminum Dissipators” by Cao et al. explored a novel self-centering prestressed concrete pier with external energy dissipators to realize seismic resilient performance and to enhance their corrosion-resisting property. The paper titled “A Low-Cost Version of EMI Technique for Damage Detection in RC Structures Using Multiple Piezo Configurations” by Kaur et al. developed a low-cost electro-mechanical impedance alternative for acquiring the admittance signature. The paper titled “Wind Tunnel Test and Numerical Simulation of Wind Characteristics at a Bridge Site in Mountainous Terrain” by Li et al. conducted a wind tunnel test and a computational fluid dynamics simulation to study the wind characteristics at a bridge site in the mountainous terrain. The paper titled “Stationarity Test of Vibration Signals with Surrogate Data and Multitaper Spectrograms” by Wang et al. proposed an index to detect the stationarity of vibration signals based on a time-frequency analysis. The paper titled “Response Control of a Large Transmission-Tower Line System under Seismic Excitations by Using Friction Dampers” by Chen et al. numerically studied the effectiveness of friction dampers in the vibration mitigation of transmission-tower lines. The paper called “Wavelet-Galerkin Method for Reconstruction of Structural Dynamic Responses” by Lai et al. proposed a new technique in calculating the structural dynamic responses using the Wavelet-Galerkin approach. Finally, the paper titled “Wavelet Based Multi-Scale Finite Element Modeling and Modal Identification for Structural Damage Detection” by He et al. combined the wavelet-based finite element method and wavelet-based modal identification for structural damage detection in a multi-scale approach.
The editors of this Special Issue would like to express sincere appreciation to the authors for their preparation of the extended full papers and to the reviewers for providing high-quality and timely reviews. We would also like to thank Professor Jin-Guang Teng, the Editor-in-Chief of ASE, for approving the publication of this Special Issue. This meaningful work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 51678463) and the Chenguang Science and Technology Plan of Wuhan (grant no. 2016070204010107).