Topic: Monitoring Fatigue Cracks in Steel Bridges using Advanced Structural Health Monitoring Technologies
Speaker: Dr. Xiangxiong Kong (University of Guam)
Time: 14:30 PM, July 5
Venue: Room 320, Weimin Building
Abstract:
Fatigue cracks that develop in steel highway bridges under repetitive traffic loads are one of the major mechanisms that degrade structural integrity. If bridges are not appropriately inspected and maintained, fatigue cracks can eventually lead to catastrophic failures, in particular for fracture-critical bridges. Despite various levels of success of crack monitoring methods over the past decades in the fields of structural heath monitoring (SHM) and non-destructive evaluation (NDE), monitoring fatigue cracks in steel bridges is still challenging due to the complex structural joint layout and unpredictable crack propagation paths. In this presentation, advanced SHM technologies are proposed for detecting and monitoring fatigue cracks in steel bridges. These technologies are categorized as: 1) a large-area strain sensing technology based on soft elastomeric capacitor (SEC) sensors; and 2) a non-contact computer vision-based fatigue crack detection approach. In SEC-based fatigue crack sensing, the research focuses are placed on numerical prediction of the SEC’s response under fatigue cracking and experimental validations of sensing algorithms for monitoring fatigue cracks over long-term. In vision-based fatigue crack detection approach, a novel sensing methodology is established through video feature tracking. Laboratory test results verified that the proposed approaches can robustly identify the true fatigue crack from many non-crack edges. Overall, the proposed advanced SHM technologies show great promise for fatigue crack damage detection of steel bridges in laboratory configurations, hence form the basis for long-term fatigue sensing solutions in field applications
Biography of the Speaker:
Dr. Xiangxiong Kong is an assistant professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Guam in the United States since 2019. Prior to that, he received his doctoral degree in Civil Engineering at the University of Kansas in the United States. During his Ph.D., he investigated novel fatigue crack inspection approaches in steel bridges using advanced sensing technologies. As a Ph.D. student, he won the 3rd place in the student research competition at the annual conference of the Engineering Mechanics Institute (EMI) of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in 2017. Prior to his Ph.D., Dr. Kong worked as a structural engineer in the Institute of Earthquake Engineering at the China Academy of Building Research (CABR) in Beijing, China from 2009 to 2014. He was responsible for seismic inspection and design of building structures. Prior to that, he earned his Master degree in Structural Engineering in CABR in 2009 and Bachelor degree of Civil Engineering in Zhejiang University in 2006. Dr. Kong’s research interests include structural health monitoring, earthquake engineering, and computer vision applications in civil engineering. He is the co-author of more than 20 journal articles and conference papers. His recent article entitled “Vision-based fatigue crack detection of steel structures using video feature tracking” was listed as one of the most downloaded papers in the journal of Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering (IF 5.475).
School of Reliability and Systems Engineering
