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Content archived on 2024-06-18

Internet-based Structural Health Monitoring System

Final Report Summary - ISMS (Internet-based Structural Health Monitoring System)

ISMS aimed to address the significant commercial opportunity and rapidly emerging technological potential of improved Damage Detection or Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) technologies for large-scale civil infrastructure by challenging significant and non-trivial, inter-disciplinary and intersectoral barriers currently preventing industrial application and take-up of these technologies. The principal strategic objective of ISMS was joint design and development of a fully automated internet-based damage detection procedure robust to environmental changes with application to fully instrumented large-scale civil infrastructures, primarily bridges.

Recent advances in sophisticated monitoring devices; the miniaturization and cost reductions of
computing hardware as well as novel data analysis procedures hold significant potential with respect to cost effective, condition-based maintenance philosophies as well as damage detection and mitigation after major seismic events. Through an objective-driven transfer of knowledge (ToK) programme between industry and academia, ISMS took a necessary integrated approach, according to which state-of the art (SOA) scientific knowledge based on data interrogation algorithms and vibration-based structural damage identification was coupled with industrial knowledge of market applications and exploitation routes.

ISMS advanced existing SOA within the areas of algorithm development, data processing and interfaces. A progressive damage monitoring system for damage assessment was created, enabling the development of an internet-based SHM system to monitor hundreds of bridges autonomously. Furthermore, large amounts of complex data were translated into key imperatives, to allow the display of information on e.g. safe routes out of the emergency area.

ISMS researched, characterized, and modeled a number of technological concepts and algorithms with respect to their potential for SHM of Bridges. The algorithms and concepts were subsequently subjected to analytical and experimental investigations – and their implications for data processing were evaluated and optimized. Finally, the two research tracks on algorithms and data processing were brought together in work on interfaces and applications. Due to the complexity of the internal architecture and design of the concepts, these were integrated horizontally through a multidisciplinary framework and extensive ToK activities involving disciplines such as structural dynamics operational modal analysis, software architecture and computing. The project objectives and results offers strong intersectoral and interdisciplinary coupling between, on the one hand, identification-based methods with up-to-date information on the structure - and, on the other hand, statistical damage detection techniques with strong theoretical background, communicating within a test platform on the instrumented structure. The approach was validated on both some large scale and complex numerical models and on an ambitious and rigorous experimental setup, thus demonstrating its potential industrial transfer.

The project achieved most of its objectives and technical goals. The main substantive deliverable and result of the project is the commercial software package ARTeMIS and its modules.

For more information on the project please contact Palle Andersen from SVS - http://www.svibs.com/.