The timely analysis of deformation monitoring data and reasonable diagnosis of the structural health are key tasks in dam health monitoring studies. This article presents a spatio-temporal clustering and health diagnosis method for super-high concrete arch dams that uses deformation monitoring data obtained from plumb meters. The spatio-temporal expression of the deformation monitoring data is proposed first by upgrading a punctuated time series to a curved panel time series, including cross-sectional, dam axial, and temporal changing directions. Second, a comprehensive similarity indicator on three aspects, namely, the absolute distance, incremental distance, and growth rate distance, is constructed after a deep discussion on deformation similarity characteristics both temporally and spatially. Next, the temporal clustering method is proposed by keeping the key features, namely, extreme points and turning points, while eliminating extraneous details, namely, noise points. Finally, the optimal spatio-temporal clustering of dam deformation is achieved by designing a multi-scale fuzzy C-means method of data mining and its iterative algorithm. The proposed method is applied to the Jinping-I hydraulic structure, which is the highest concrete arch dam in the world. The clustering results is quite sensitive in different weight coefficients of the comprehensive similarity indicator and clustering numbers of fuzzy C-means method. The dam deformation behaviors on high-water-level, water-falling, and low-water-level periods are analyzed and diagnosed. The advanced version of proposed methods is verified by comparative analysis on dam health diagnosis results obtained from ordinary deformation distribution figures and the spatio-temporal clustering figures. The proposed method will facilitate the recognition of abnormal deformation areas and associated safety diagnoses.

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A hybrid method for optimal sensor placement is introduced to position detection sensors on hydro-structures to maximize the monitored structural dynamic information. In the hybrid method, modal assurance criterion matrices and effective independence vectors were applied as the optimization principle for adding and eliminating potential sensor locations in coordinate sets. The energy revision factor was implemented to measure the modal strain energy and ensure the arrangement of sensors at the large energy locations. QR decomposition of the modal matrix was employed to decrease the influence of the initial sensor positions. A computational simulation of an arch dam model, considering 20 sensors and the first six orders of modal vibrations, was used to demonstrate the feasibility of the method. The advantages and disadvantages of existing methods were demonstrated by comparison criteria including the modal assurance criterion, modal kinetic energy criterion, Fisher information matrix, and root-mean square error criterion. The results showed that the method proposed in this article provides linear independent and orthogonal modal vectors, minimizing the relative mean square error of the measured vibration modes, which fundamentally indicates that the identified vibration characteristics of the concrete arch dam are accurate and reasonable.

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Structural health monitoring (SHM) has been widely employed to reveal the hidden safety information and to diagnose the safety status in dam engineering fields. As one of the most important parameters of SHM, crack opening displacement (COD) is often used to evaluate the cracks or joints of concrete dams. In this paper, a new dam health analytic perspective is introduced by integrating the data mining method into SHM field, focusing on revealing the association rules in COD monitoring data. The association rules are investigated systematically, considering the cause-effect relations between external loads and structural response, the temporal characteristics of time series for a single sensor, the spatial characteristics of monitoring data for multisensors, and the abnormal characteristics for different items of structural responses. The association relation is quantified by proposing the quantitative indexes, including support degree, confidence degree, and promotion degree. The methods are used in the COD monitoring data of the Baishan concrete gravity-arch dam, which is located in a severely cold area in northeastern China. Results show that 4 out of 24 cause-effect association rules are extracted by calculating the association degree of monitored COD values, and 21 out of 24 crack sensors present a temporal association relationship, among which the confidence degree of two sensors reaches 100%. The variation trend of COD values is relevant with the locations of the crack sensors. These results are consistent with the dam safety monitoring theories and models, which would be very useful for extracting the SHM information between different sensors, predicting the trend of COD value and repairing the monitoring data series of COD sensors, or even for discovering an abnormal signal for the operation safety of dams.

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