Infrastructure development is a common feature of emerging countries. As a result, the design and construction of complex structures susceptible to damage is becoming increasingly common. Over the years, multiple advances in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) haven allowed researchers and engineers to detect, locate, and quantify structural damage in critical components of civil engineering structures. Frequency-based methods have demonstrated their reliability in multiple numerical and experimental applications. This study presents a brief chronological literature review of methodologies based on frequency analysis that have been used in the detection ofstructural damage over the last forty years. It is worth noting that the paper focuses on computer-aided techniques such as artificial neuronal networks (ANN), genetic algorithms (GAs), and metaheuristics that have been employed to solve the inverse damage detection problem.
Crowding is a critical condition for footbridges that are prone to vibration problems from pedestrian loads. Synchronization of pedestrian movements has been identified as the cause of the excessive lateral vibration in some footbridges. Two conditions have been named as the cause of synchronization: increase in crowd density and pedestrian-structure interaction. The former would be related to the onset of the phenomenon; the latter takes place after structural vibration reaches a certain level. This paper focuses on the former condition. A test program to investigate whether this condition occurs was carried out for a range of pedestrian densities, complementing data previously published on this subject. The head movement of pedestrians walking both in groups and in a flow was recorded by a video camera, and the examination of the video indicated no synchronization from densification. However, it was observed that the lateral sway of the pedestrians’ bodies increased with the increase of density....
1 June 2004 in Journal of the Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering
In the analysis and design of framed structures, the traditional methods are based on the simplified assumption that the joints are completely either pinned or rigid. However, the experimental investigations show that the frame connections present an intermediate behaviour between these two extreme cases. The present work is concerned with the dynamic elastic analysis of semi-rigid plane frames subjected to wind pressures. The dynamic excitation induced by the wind is estimated by adopting the simulation method of Monte Carlo. The wind flutuation pressures are decomposed into a limited quantity of harmonic components that are then combined many times, making possible the accomplishment of a probabilistic analysis and the choice of a characteristic response. The frame is considered as a set of contiguous bar elements, connected to each other at the nodes, and the connections are modelled as zero-length rotational springs. A nodal description of the kinetic and kinematic laws is given under the restriction of small displacements. The behaviour of the frame material and connections is described by linear elastic moment-rotation relationships, which are presented in the stiffness form. In order to take into account the effect of the semi-rigid behaviour of beam-to-column connections, the mass and stiffness matrices are developed as the sum of the conventional finite element matrices and correction matrices that incorporate the flexibility of the end joints. The problem of forced vibrations is then solved by means of the numerical integration of the
7 June 2018 in Journal of the Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering