RESEARCH ACTIVITIES ON STRUCTURAL HEALTH

MONITORING OF CIVIL INFRASTRUCTURES IN KOREA

Chung-Bang Yun¹, Jin-Hak Yi², and Jong-Jae Lee³

ABSTACT

Developments and applications of structural health monitoring for civil infrastructures have

become popular in Korea, since the early 1990’s. The number of the deteriorated infrastructure

systems, mostly built in the rapidly industrialized period of 1970’s, has increased rapidly and the

recognition of the potential devastating disruption of the infrastructure systems due to natural and

man-made hazards has also increased. The structural health monitoring systems are generally

composed of two major parts: (1) hardware such as sensors, data acquisition equipment, data

transmission systems, etc, and (2) software such as signal processing, information processing,

damage assessment, information display and management, etc. The first hardware part involves

the observation of the structure using periodically sampled response measurements from arrays of

sensors, the storage of the measured data, and the transmission of data to the control center.

Conventional hardware systems have several disadvantages such as cost of expensive sensor and

equipment, durability of sensors, and huge installation time. Smart sensors can play an important

role to improve the measurement capability and to resolve the shortages of conventional sensors

owing to the scalability, durability, anti-electric noise, low cost and power consumption of smart

sensors. In the second software part, the extraction of the damage-sensitive features from the

measurements is performed using various signal and information processing techniques, and then

damage assessment algorithms are applied to determine the current state of the structural integrity.

In this paper, current status of structural health monitoring systems in Korea is reviewed. Then

the research and development activities on smart sensors and signal/information processing are

summarized.

1 Professor, Dept. of Civil & Environmental Engineering, KAIST, Daejeon 305-701, Korea, Email:

ycb@kaist.ac.kr

2 Research Assistant Professor, Smart Infrastructure Technology Center, KAIST, Daejeon 305-701, Korea

3 Post Doctoral Researcher, Dept. of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Univ. of California, Irvine,

CA92697, USA