US-Taiwan Workshop on Smart Structural Technology for Seismic Hazard Mitigation

A wireless sensing unit is designed for application in structural monitoring and damage detection system. Embedded in the wireless monitoring module, a two-tier prediction model, using auto-regressive (AR) and the autoregressive model with exogenous inputs (ARX) is used for obtaining the damage sensitive feature. To validate the performance of the proposed wireless monitoring and damage detection system, an almost full scale single-story RC-frame with brick wall system is instrumented with a wireless monitoring module system. White noise and seismic ground motion records are applied to the base of the structure using a shaking table. Pattern classification method is then adopted to classify the structure as damaged or undamaged using the AR time series coefficients as feature vector. The demonstration of damage detection methodology is shown to be capable of identifying the damage using wireless sensing unit with monitor module. The accuracy and sensitivity of today’s MEMS-based vibration sensors are approaching the stringent requirements imposed by structural sensing.