Informatics and Structural Intelligence: trends, challenges, research directions, applications
Résumé
European transportation infrastructures are getting old. Their ageing is expected to culminate between 2010 and 2020. Maintenance of existing infrastructures has become a priority and now costs more than the construction of new ones. But any cost efficient assessment, maintenance and strengthening process requires specific information about the current condition state of a structure. Since early detection of cracks in roads, bridges, tunnels and other civil structures is of prime interest in the context of improving safety and reducing costs, ”intelligent” structures that can detect the formation of a crack are a major stake in Europe and worldwide. An ultimate goal would be to build structures that could call in an engineer or even auto-adapt to alleviate any risks generated by the forming fractures or other damages. However, even though a crack can have a tremendous impact on the safety of the structure, the measured repercussion from a forming crack on the structure is rather small. Detecting the crack is a major difficulty, because of the subtlety of the impact, and consequently the slight change in the response is poorly measured by the sensor. Moreover, all cracks may not be dangerous, only part of the cracks is worth being monitored, but strategies are needed. A bottleneck is the
lack of optimized sensing capabilities and related algorithms, or the lack of real dissemination of relevant pieces of knowledge and operational tools. Many things exist which are not routinely used if not completely ignored by practitioners.
It is now commonly accepted that Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) not only should focus on finding out emerging damages but also should provide with a diagnosis regarding the severity of the damages and with a prognosis, or prediction, of remaining life-time of residual bearing capacity
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