This study introduces a unique prototype system for structural health monitoring (SHM), SmartSync, which uses the building's existing Internet backbone as a system of virtual instrumentation cables to permit modular and largely plug-and-play deployments. Within this framework, data streams from distributed heterogeneous sensors are pushed through network interfaces in real time and seamlessly synchronized and aggregated by a centralized server, which performs basic data acquisition, event triggering, and database management while also providing an interface for data visualization and analysis that can be securely accessed. The system enables a scalable approach to monitoring tall and complex structures that can readily interface a variety of sensors and data formats (analog and digital) and can even accommodate variable sampling rates. This study overviews the SmartSync system, its installation/operation in the world's tallest building, Burj Khalifa, and proof-of-concept in triggering under dual excitations (wind and earthquake).
Topology optimization has traditionally been developed in a deterministic setting, notwithstanding the considerable uncertainties that generally affect both the system as well as the excitation. Therefore, the development of methods that are capable of describing the performance of uncertain systems in a fully probabilistic setting would represent an important step forward. In particular, the ability to consider reliability constraints written in terms of first excursion probabilities posed on systems driven by general stochastic excitation would allow a wide variety of important design scenarios to be modeled. This paper is focused on proposing a simulation-centered reliability-based topology optimization framework to this end. In particular, an approach is developed based on defining, from the argumentation of the simulation process, an optimization sub-problem that not only approximately decouples the probabilistic analysis from the optimization loop, but takes a form that can be extremely efficiently solved. By solving a limited sequence of sub-problems, solutions are found that rigorously meet the first excursion constraints of the original problem. A series of case studies are presented illustrating the potential of the proposed framework.
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