Hindawi Publishing Corporation

Shock and Vibration

Volume 2015, Article ID 271912, 3 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/271912

Editorial
Distributed Sensor Networks for Health Monitoring of Civil
Infrastructures
Ting-Hua Yi,1 Gangbing Song,2 Stathis C. Stiros,3 and Bo Chen4
1

School of Civil Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116023, China

Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204-4006, USA
3
Department of Civil Engineering, Patras University, 26500 Patras, Greece
4
School of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430070, China
2

Correspondence should be addressed to Ting-Hua Yi; [email protected]

Received 4 March 2015; Accepted 4 March 2015
Copyright 2015 Ting-Hua Yi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) implies the integration

of nondestructive evaluation methods within a system to
enable autonomous state awareness for structural integrity.
SHM systems have been optimized to cover wide areas as
well as focus on specific hot-spots for both metallic and
composite structures. They can be configured to monitor
adverse changes such as fatigue cracks, corrosion, delamination, loose bolts, or impact damage either in real-time or
on demand. Immediate benefits of SHM include drastically
reducing inspection costs, minimizing preventative maintenance, increasing asset availability, and extending remaining
useful life of structures. Future benefits could include using
SHM data to improve design-margin efficiency for lighterweight structures, facilitating structural certification and/or
quality assurance, and dynamically controlling operating
envelopes. Over the past few years, there has been rapid
development of SHM technique; many smart sensors and
intelligent algorithms have been developed. Advances in
sensing technologies have also enabled the use of large numbers of sensors for health monitoring of civil infrastructures.
The sensors utilized in a SHM system are required to monitor
not only the structural status including stress, displacement,
and acceleration, but also those influential environmental
parameters, such as wind speed, temperature, and the quality
of its foundation. Since a large-scale sensor network needs
to be involved in a SHM system, how to deploy it in a
complicated, spatially extended structure and the resulting

best identification of structural characteristics by the data

acquired from those locations will be challenging tasks.
Therefore, in the light of the above considerations, this
special issue was launched. Numerous investigators worldwide were invited to contribute their original papers and
review articles on the theme of this special issue. These papers
present the most recent advances, progress, and ideas in
the field of distributed sensor networks for SHM and its
application includes smart, bioinspired, nanometer, wireless,
and remote sensing technology; intelligent algorithms and
evaluation criteria in design of sensor networks; uncertainty,
sensitivity, reliability, and redundancy in vibration monitoring; vibration data cleaning, compression, mining, and
fusing technology; application of large-scale sensor networks
for civil infrastructures. In the paper Fatigue Performance
Assessment of Composite Arch Bridge Suspenders Based
on Actual Vehicle Loads by B. Chen et al., the fatigue
conditions of bridge suspenders are analyzed according to the
Palmgren-Miner linear fatigue cumulative damage criterion.
In the paper Sensor Placement Optimization of Vibration
Test on Medium-Speed Mill by L. Zhu et al., the optimal
sensor placement of medium-speed mill is conducted using
the effective independence method and QR decomposition
algorithm. The results showed that the order of modal shapes
had an important influence on the optimization results. The
paper Feasibility Verification of Mountable PZT-Interface
for Impedance Monitoring in Tendon-Anchorage by T.C. Huynh et al. numerically evaluated the performance

2
of the mountable PZT-interface for impedance monitoring
in tendon-anchorage. In the paper Effect of Temperature
Variation on Vibration Monitoring of Prestressed Concrete
Girders by T.-C. Huynh et al., the effect of temperature
variation on vibration monitoring of prestressed concrete
girders is experimentally analyzed. The paper Evaluation
on Impact Interaction between Abutment and Steel Girder
Subjected to Nonuniform Seismic Excitation by Y. Zheng
et al. investigates the pounding interaction between the
abutment and the steel girder underground motions for
structural performance assessment. In the paper The LongTerm Settlement Deformation Automatic Monitoring System
for the Chinese High-Speed Railway by X. Wang et al., using
the newly built Shijiazhuang-Jinan passenger railway as an
example, the authors developed a set of online monitoring
systems, which were automatic, real-time, remote, and visual,
and they were suited to the standards of the Beijing-Shanghai
high-speed railway. The paper Impact Coefficient Analysis
of Long-Span Railway Cable-Stayed Bridge Based on Coupled Vehicle-Bridge Vibration by Y. Li et al. discusses the
impact effects on main girder, stayed cable, bearings, and
bridge tower at various vehicle speeds. The paper Running
Safety of Trains under Vessel-Bridge Collision investigates
the characteristics of a train-bridge system under vesselbridge collision. The paper Health Status Monitoring of
Cuplock Scaffold Joint Connection Based on Wavelet Packet
Analysis by L. Zhang et al. describes how to use the
piezoelectric transducers to monitor cuplock connection for
cuplock scaffold based on the wavelet packet analysis. The
paper Study Based on Bridge Health Monitoring System on
Multihazard Load Combinations of Earthquake and Truck
Loads for Bridge Design in the Southeast Coastal Areas
of China by D. Sun et al. presents a method to combine
earthquake load and truck load in the service life of bridges.
The paper Embedded Decentralized Modal Identification
of Four-Story Benchmark Structure Using Smart Sensor
Network by A. Y. Fallah et al. proposes a two-step algorithm
for system identification of structures using wireless sensing
network with decentralized data acquisition strategy. In the
paper Acoustic Emission Signal Recognition of Different
Rocks Using Wavelet Transform and Artificial Neural Network by X. Liu et al., the wavelet transform and artificial
neural network is applied to determine rock types from
their AE characteristic parameters. The paper Probability
Model of Hangzhou Bay Bridge Vehicle Loads Using Weighin-Motion Data by D. Sun et al. performs a statistical
analysis of the vehicle loads on Hangzhou Bay Bridge using
more than 3 months of weigh-in-motion data from the
site. The paper Anchor Dragging Analysis of Rock-Berm
Using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Method by J. Woo
et al. presents dynamic responses of rock-berm structural
system under anchor dragging and accordingly provides the
characteristics of the stresses and displacements obtained.
The paper A Wireless Strain Sensor Network for Structural
Health Monitoring by C. Liu et al. presents the design and
characterization of a new wireless strain sensor board. The
results of the characterization of the fabricated device in
combination with IRIS mote show very good performance
with respect to the devices static, sensitivity, and dynamical

Shock and Vibration

characteristics. The paper Research on Impact Process of
Lander Footpad against Simulant Lunar Soils by B. Huang et
al. investigates the interaction between lunar soil simulants
and the lander footpad during the impact process using
subscale model tests based on prototype vertical impact
test apparatus. The paper Life-Cycle Monitoring of LongSpan PSC Box Girder Bridges through Distributed Sensor
Network: Strategies, Methods, and Applications by Z. Chen
et al. proposes a life-cycle monitoring strategy to well capture the behavior of the bridge during its whole life and
to maximize the use of sensors. In the paper Detection
on Structural Sudden Damage Using Continuous Wavelet
Transform and Lipschitz Exponent by B. Chen et al., a
detection approach based on the CWT is proposed in terms
of the decomposed detailed coefficients of continuous wavelet
transform to detect the damage time instant and location.
The Lipschitz exponent is mathematically used to estimate
the local properties of certain function and is applied to
reflect the damage severity. The paper Estimation of Evolutionary Spectra of Monitored Seismic Ground Motions by
Transformation of Correlation Functions by Z. Xu et al.
proposes a method for the estimation of evolutionary power
spectral density of a nonstationary process by transforming
the correlation functions of its sample time histories. In
the paper Seismic Fortification Analysis of the Guoduo
Gravity Dam in Tibet, China by P. Lin et al., a dam
seismic failure risk control method is proposed based on the
cracking mechanism induced by the dynamic load to ensure
dam safety and stability. The paper Effects of Concrete on
Propagation Characteristics of Guided Wave in Steel Bar
Embedded in Concrete by Z. Zheng and Y. Lei investigates
dispersion equations of longitudinal wave propagation in
reinforced concrete member for the purpose of monitoring
steels embedded in concrete. In the paper Establishment and
Application of the Wind and Structural Health Monitoring
System for the Runyang Yangtze River Bridge by H. Wang
et al., the establishment of the Wind and Structural Health
Monitoring System (WSHMS) implemented on the Runyang
Yangtze River Bridge (RYRB) in China is introduced. The
paper Free-Interface Modal Synthesis Based Substructural
Damage Detection Method by S. Chen et al. proposes a
free-interface modal synthesis based substructure sensitivity
method for damage detection. The paper Early-Warning
Method of Train Running Safety of a High-Speed Railway
Bridge Based on Transverse Vibration Monitoring by Y.-L.
Ding et al. presents an early-warning method of train running
safety of the high-speed railway bridge by adopting principal
component analysis (PCA) method.
Without a doubt, the papers reflect the state-of-the-art
researches and developments of this subject.

Acknowledgments
As the Guest Editors of the special issue, we would like
to express our sincere appreciation to all the authors who
contributed their work to this exciting special issue. The
Guest Editors also thank the reviewers for their valuable and
insightful comments that greatly benefited the improvement

Shock and Vibration

of paper quality. This meaningful work was partially supported by the 973 Program (Grant no. 2015CB060000), the
National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant nos.
51421064, 51478081, 51222806, and 51178083), and the Science
Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars of Dalian (Grant no.
2014J11JH125).
Ting-Hua Yi
Gangbing Song
Stathis C. Stiros
Bo Chen

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