How to identify modal parameters accurately and automatically is an important issue in structural health monitoring. In this paper, two aspects of this issue are investigated based on the algorithm of natural excitation technology (NExT) in conjunction with the Eigensystem realization algorithm (ERA): (1) First, the selection of the user-defined parameters (sampling points of the fast Fourier transform and the data length) is discussed. Based on this, an empirical equation for determining the dimensions of the Hankel matrix is presented; (2) Second, we propose an improved stabilization diagram to determine the physical modes automatically. The modal frequency, damping ratio, extended modal amplitude coherence (EMAC) and modal amplitude coherence (MAC) are applied as criteria. The reliability of the proposed method is verified by a numerical simulation and two applications to a large-scale bridge. It is shown that the proposed method can distinguish the physical modes from spurious modes effectively and the most reliable physical modes can be automatically identified.

Due to sensor failure, noise interference and other factors, the data collected in the structural health monitoring (SHM) system will show a variety of abnormal patterns, which will bring great uncertainty to the structural safety assessment. This paper proposes an automatic data anomaly diagnosis method for SHM based on a multimodal deep neural network. In order to improve the detection accuracy, both two-dimensional and one-dimensional features of the sensor data are fused in the multimodal deep neural network. The network consists of two convolutional neural network (CNN) channels, one a 2D-CNN channel for extracting time–frequency features of sensor data and the other a 1D-CNN channel for extracting raw one-dimensional features of sensor data. After convolution and pooling operations for the sensor data by the 2D channel and 1D channel separately, the two types of extracted features are flattened into one-dimensional vectors and concatenated at the concatenation layer. The concatenated vector is then fed into fully connected layers for final SHM data anomaly classification. In order to evaluate the reliability of the proposed method, the monitored data lasting for one month of a long-span cable-stayed bridge were used for training, validation, and testing. Six types of training conditions (missing, minor, outlier, over-range oscillation, trend, and drift) are studied and analyzed to address the issue of imbalanced training data. With an accuracy rate of 95.10%, the optimal model demonstrates the effectiveness and capability of the proposed method. The proposed method shows a promising future as a reliable AI-assisted digital tool for safety assessment in structural health monitoring systems.

Deflection is one of the key indexes for the safety evaluation of bridge structures. In reality, due to the changing operational and environmental conditions, the deflection signals measured by structural health monitoring systems are greatly affected. These ambient changes in the system often cover subtle changes in the vibration signals caused by damage to the system. The deflection signals of prestressed concrete (PC) bridges are regarded as the superposition of different effects, including concrete shrinkage, creep, prestress loss, material deterioration, temperature effects, and live load effects. According to multiscale analysis theory of the long-term deflection signal, in this paper, an integrated machine learning algorithm that combines a Butterworth filter, ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD), principle component analysis (PCA), and fast independent component analysis (FastICA) is proposed for separating the individual deflection components from a measured single channel deflection signal. The proposed algorithm consists of four stages: (1) the live load effect, which is a high-frequency signal, is separated from the raw signal by a Butterworth filter; (2) the EEMD algorithm is used to extract the intrinsic mode function (IMF) components; (3) these IMFs are utilized as input in the PCA model and some uncorrelated and dominant basis components are extracted; and (4) FastICA is applied to derive the independent deflection component. The simulated results show that each individual deflection component can be successfully separated when the noise level is under 10%. Verified by a practical application, the algorithm is feasible for extracting the structural deflection (including concrete shrinkage, creep, and prestress loss) only caused by structural damage or material deterioration.