Unsupervised statistical damage diagnosis for structural health monitoring of existing civil structures

Structural health monitoring is an important technology for ageing aerospace and civil structures. For this structural health monitoring, fiber optic sensors are increasing in popularity; however, several kinds of sensors are usually required, including sensors other than fiber optic sensors. Thus, a new technology for transforming conventional sensors into distributed sensors is required. The present study proposes Ethernet LAN technologies for the sensor integration required for structural health monitoring, and discusses the advantages of adopting this technology. Moreover, the paper describes an Ethernet-based health monitoring system and a statistical unsupervised damage detecting method for automatic damage diagnosis. Then, we create a system for monitoring the damage to an expressway tunnel jet-fan using system identification and statistical tools. Damage was detected from changes in a set of data measuring loads on the turnbuckles of the jet-fan. The resulting automatic diagnosis of damage to the jet-fan was successful.