This paper reviews the research of monitoring technologies for bolted structural connections. The acoustoelastic effect based method, the piezoelectric active sensing method, and the piezoelectric impedance method are the three commonly used to monitor bolted connections. The basic principle and the applications of these three methods are discussed in detail in this paper. In addition, this paper presents a comparison of these methods and discusses their suitability for in situ or real-time bolt connection monitoring.
Piezoceramic based active sensing methods have been researched to monitor preload on bolt connections. However, there is a saturation problem involved with this type of method. The transmitted energy is sometimes saturated before the maximum preload which is due to it coming into contact with flat surfaces. When it comes to flat contact surfaces, the true contact area will easily saturate with the preload. The design of a new type of bolt looseness monitoring sensor, a smart washer, is to mitigate the saturation problem. The smart washer is composed of two annular disks with contact surfaces that are machined into convex and concave respectively, to eliminate the complete flat contact surfaces and to reduce the saturation effect. One piezoelectric patch is bonded on the non-contact surface of each annular disk. These two mating annular disks form a smart washer. One of the two piezoelectric patches serves as an actuator to generate an ultrasonic wave that propagates through the contact surface; the other one serves as a sensor to detect the propagated waves. The wave energy propagated through the contact surface is proportional to the true contact area which is determined by the bolt preload. The time reversal method is used to extract the peak of the focused signal as the index of the transmission wave energy; then, the relationship between the signal peak and bolt preload is obtained. Experimental results show that the focused signal peak value changes with the bolt preload and presents an approximate linear relationship when the saturation problem is experienced. The proposed smart washer can monitor the full range of the rated preload.
In this paper, the time reversal method based on piezoelectric active sensing is investigated for health monitoring of bolted joints. Experiments are conducted on bolted joints to study the relationship between the time reversal focused signal peak amplitudes and the bolt preload. Two piezoelectric patches are bonded on two different sides of a bolted joint. Any one of the piezoelectric patches can be used as an actuator to generate an ultrasonic wave, and the other one can be used as a sensor to detect the propagated wave. With the time reversal method, the received response signal is reversed in the time domain and then is re-emitted as an excitation signal to acquire the time reversal focused signals. The experimental results show that the time reversal focused signal peak amplitudes increase with the increasing bolt preload until reaching saturation, and when the bolt preload increases to a certain value, the focused signal peak amplitudes will remain unchanged. Experiments show that the surface roughness of the bolted joint impacts the saturation value. A higher surface roughness value corresponds to a higher saturation value. In addition, the proposed method has a high signal to noise ratio benefiting from the time reversal method time and space focusing ability.
The aim of this study is to determine the stochastic dynamic characteristics of the system due to the uncertainty of the gap contact between the mooring cable and the structural body of the submerged multi-body structure. The sag effect caused by the light, flexible, and low damping characteristics of the mooring cable and its dynamic elongation under the action of the flow field and the impact of the gap connection is considered. The sag effect is corrected using the equivalent elastic modulus method; the stochastic generalized non-deterministic dynamic model of the system considering the dynamic elongation and clearance contact of the mooring cable is established; and the Newmark-β method and the interval algorithm are used to solve the problem. The calculation results show that the mean and peak values of the kinematic parameters of the structure are larger than the ideal articulated state; the dynamic tension is changed randomly; and the deflection angle of the gap-contact state is greater than that of the articulated state, which may lead to the instability of the system. Therefore, when studying the concrete structure in water, we should consider the contact state of the joint and analyze its stochastic dynamic characteristics.
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