The Chulitna River Bridge is a 790-ft five girder, five-span steel bridge on the Parks Highway between Fairbanks and Anchorage, Alaska. This bridge was built in 1970 and widened in 1993. Under the no-live load condition, five support bearings are not in contact. Heavily loaded trucks often travel across this bridge to the oil fields in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. A virtual finite element modeling, dynamic field testing of the “ambient vibrational response,” and structural health monitoring system are used to analyze, evaluate, and monitor the structural performance. As the first stage of the research, this article presents results from the dynamic testing and evaluation of the structural responses of the bridge. In the dynamic field testing, 15 portable accelerometers were placed on centerline along the bridge length to record the structural response, and an ambient free-decay response was used to evaluate the dynamic properties of the bridge structure. Natural frequencies and modal damping ratios were identified and characterized using Hilbert–Huang transform and fast Fourier transform methods. Compared with conventional approaches, this study demonstrates that (1) the Hilbert–Huang method was found to be effective and suitable for modal parameter identification of a long steel girder bridge using ambient truck loading; (2) the nonlinear damping was, for the first time, identified based on Hilbert–Huang transform’s amplitude–time slope; (3) modal frequencies are very sensitive to sensor location so their position should be optimized.
A loop topology based white light interferometric sensor network for perimeter security has been designed and demonstrated. In the perimeter security sensing system, where fiber sensors are packaged in the suspended cable or buried cable, a bi-directional optical path interrogator is built by using Michelson or Mach-Zehnder interferometer. A practical implementation of this technique is presented by using an amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) light source and standard single mode fiber, which are common in communication industry. The sensor loop topology is completely passive and absolute length measurements can be obtained for each sensing fiber segment so that it can be used to measure quasi-distribution strain perturbation. For the long distance perimeter monitoring, this technique not only extends the multiplexing potential, but also provides a redundancy for the sensing system. One breakdown point is allowed in the sensor loop because the sensing system will still work even if the embedded sensor loop breaks somewhere.
Debonding failure of the concrete cover in reinforced concrete beams retrofitted with fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) composites is a brittle phenomenon which in most cases occurs in an abrupt manner. A complete understanding of bond requires information about the relationship between the local bond stress and slip. Bond-slip defines the constitutive relationship of the interface, and it provides means for computation of ultimate strength and distribution of the bond stress. For FRP composites interface slip is very small even at the ultimate stage prior to failure. For this reason, the study of local bond in the earlier studies did not include slip. This article presents a fiber optic based method for measurement of local slip at the interface between concrete and FRP as well as for prediction of bond failure in reinforced concrete members. Since bond failure in FRP retrofitted concrete is a brittle phenomenon, development of effective means to predict the failure prior to occurrence plays an important role in structural health monitoring of such structures. Therefore, the scope of the study includes two types of tests, namely pull out tests and beam flexure tests. In general, the measured interface slip between concrete substrate and FRP at ultimate load stage is 560 mm. The fiber optic based system is capable of measuring the interface slip with a resolution of 1 mm. In flexure, the long gauge distributed sensors are able to predict the debonding and peeling of the FRP fabric from the concrete beam through deformation reversals. A numerical model based on finite element analysis of the beams is developed to verify the capabilities of the fiber optic sensor through computation of principal stresses at the interface.
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