Search

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is the process of detecting damage in structures. Typically, the damage-sensitive feature identification is based on fitting some models to the measured system response data. The parameters of these models or the prediction errors associated with these models then become the desired damage-sensitive features. Real-world structures usually exhibit significant nonlinear behaviors. Data-driven nonlinear system identification (NSI) is essential to obtain accurate models of structural dynamics for reliable damage detection. However, on the one hand, the data acquisition of real-world structures for damage detection is usually difficult or scarce. On the other hand, NSI generally needs to solve a nonlinear optimization problem that requires more computational time for convergence than linear system identification. Data efficiency and computational efficiency become two critical challenges in data-driven NSI. To address these challenges, this work presents a proof-of-principle study on developing a meta learning-based method for efficient data-driven NSI. Specifically, the meta learning algorithm leverages a previously collected database of similar but different systems to learn the meta-knowledge about how to identify a new system, enabling a fast identification/modeling with limited data. Numerical simulations are performed to validate the method on fundamental nonlinear dynamical systems widely seen in civil engineering. It is observed that the presented meta learning-based method outperforms the conventional method in terms of both data and computational efficiency. Limitations of this work are further discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vortex-induced vibrations (VIVs) have been observed on a long-span suspension bridge. The nonstationary wind in the field characterized by the time-varying mean wind speed is likely to lead to time-varying aerodynamics of the wind-bridge system during VIVs, which is different from VIVs induced by stationary or even steady wind in wind tunnels. In this paper, data-driven methods are proposed to reveal the time-varying aerodynamics of the wind-bridge system during VIV events based on field measurements on a long-span suspension bridge. First, a variant of the sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics algorithm is proposed to identify parsimonious, time-varying aerodynamical systems that capture VIV events of the bridge. Thus we are able to posit new, data-driven, and interpretable models highlighting the aeroelastic interactions between the wind and bridge. Second, a density-based clustering algorithm is applied to discovering the potential modes of dynamics during VIV events. As a result, the time-dependent model is obtained to reveal the evolution of the aerodynamics of the wind-bridge system over time during an entire VIV event. It is found that the level of self-excited effects of the wind-bridge system is significantly time varying with the real-time wind speed and bridge motion state. The simulations of VIVs by the obtained time-dependent models show high accuracies of the models with an averaged normalized mean-square error of 0.0023. The clustering of obtained models shows underlying distinct dynamical regimes of the wind-bridge system, which are distinguished by the level of self-excited effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]