The deteriorating state of bridges in the United States has become a societal issue. The confluence of a debilitated bridge population nearing the end of its design life with a shortfall of funding has led to an unsustainable position. A paradigm aimed to address this issue is termed structural health monitoring, which is the practice of identifying and tracking performance of a structure by measured data and analytical simulation. The intended use of measured data is to optimize maintenance activities and increase safety of the users, thus reducing the costs of repairs and improving sustainability of the infrastructure. The static and dynamic approaches researched thus far have yet to reliably achieve all four levels established for successful health monitoring: detection, localization, extent and prognosis of structural impairment. This project pursues fundamental research for a novel approach that uses temperature related data for monitoring health of constructed systems. The project has advantage in its simplicity of measuring temperature. The method will target all four levels of monitoring aiming to impact bridges as well as potentially other structures. The project includes an outreach component for dissemination of findings to the engineering community and incorporating concepts into engineering education.
The goal of this project is to pursue development, validation and dissemination of a novel temperature-driven approach for evaluation and monitoring of health of constructed structural systems. In current techniques temperature effects are considered undesirable; the proposed method represents a change in paradigm - the temperature influences will be used to assess the structure. The new concept is based on the hypothesis that temperature variations can be treated as a forcing function and thus be used to obtain a complete input-output relationship (or transfer function). Research and identification of this temperature-driven transfer function is the main scientific contribution targeted for the study. To accomplish this objective a research plan is devised which includes framework development, laboratory/field experimentation and validation. The key advantages of the temperature-driven concept are applicability to non-linear systems, high signal-to-noise ratio, and reduced data management and time synchronization needs. In addition, the performance of many critical structural components is highly sensitive to temperature variations allowing for accurate and reliable identification and/or monitoring. Consequently, the temperature-driven concept has transformational potential since it will bring new knowledge in structural health monitoring.
