Damage Detection and Condition Assessment of Civil Engineering Structures Using Structural Health Monitoring

Abstract

Damage identification is critical in evaluating the condition and performance of the existing civil infrastructure. This requires not just routine or critical event-based inspections, but rather a means of continuous monitoring of a structure to provide an assessment of changes as a function of time and an early warning of an unsafe condition using real-time data. Health monitoring plays an important role in the construction and maintenance of the infrastructure. It employs in situ, continuous, or regular measurements and analyses of key structural and environmental parameters under the operating conditions to identify if a damage has occurred, define its location, and estimate its severity, evaluate its consequences on the residual life of the structure also to provide warning of impending abnormal states or accidents to avoid casualties and to inform maintenance and rehabilitation decisions. SHM takes advantage of the new technologies in sensing, instrumentation, communication, and modelling to integrate them into an intelligent system. Structural Health Monitoring for civil structures is becoming increasingly popular in Europe and worldwide because of the opportunities that it offers in the fields of construction management and maintenance. Reduction of inspection costs, research, with the possibility to better understand the behaviour of structures under dynamic loads, seismic protection, observation, in real or near real-time, of the structural response and of evolution of damage, so that it is possible to produce post-earthquake scenarios and support rescue operations, are the main advantages related to the implementation of such techniques.