Complexities in Assessing Structural Health of Civil Infrastructures

The complexity in the health assessment of civil infrastructures, as it evolves over a long period of time, is briefly discussed. A simple problem can become very complex based on the current needs, sophistication required, and the technological advancements. To meet the current needs of locating defect spots and their severity accurately and efficiently, infrastructures are represented by finite elements. To increase the implementation potential, the stiffness parameters of all the elements are identified and tracked using only few noise-contaminated dynamic responses measured at small part of the infrastructure. To extract the required information, Kalman filter concept is integrated with other numerical schemes. An unscented Kalman filter (UKF) concept is developed for highly nonlinear dynamic systems. It is denoted as 3D UKF-UI-WGI. The basic UKF concept is improved in several ways. Instead of using one long duration time-history in one global iteration, very short duration time-histories and multiple global iterations with weight factors are used to locate the defect spot more accurately and efficiently. The capabilities of the procedure are demonstrated with the help of two informative examples. The proposed procedure is much superior to the extended Kalman filter-based procedures developed by the team earlier.