M.Phil. / “Failure is one of the unfortunate facts of life”. This is the very first statement in the book by Coetzee (1998). This statement is unfortunately true, leading to the fact that failure is a reality, to be dealt with. Dealing with it in a proactive way will provide warnings of an approaching failure. Dealing with it in a reactive way will go through the “surprising pain” of an unexpected breakdown or downtime. In both cases the source of failure must be known to prevent it from happening again. Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a structured method of determining the reason (root cause) of a failure. On the other hand, Vibration Analysis is one of the best known methods of condition monitoring and has the capability to indicate a reason for failure, although not necessarily the root cause or causes. The objective of this dissertation is to investigate the possibility to combine the RCA method with Vibration Analysis as forensic science to improve the success of finding root causes and their solutions.

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Johannesburg, September 2016 / The aim of this research was to investigate the bord and pillar design procedure in use at the time on chrome and platinum mines and subject it to a critical appraisal and, if necessary, propose an improved methodology. An analysis of the current method and some of the alternatives proposed in the literature has shown that the methodologies suffer from drawbacks that can be detrimental to the mining industry due to overdesign or rendering an excavation unsafe. The conclusion was that improvement is essential. The influence of the variability of the rock mass properties input parameters on the factor of safety in the current equation was calculated and the findings were that the value of the factor of safety can vary by up to 30 percent due to these variation. The proposed process adopted FLAC2D Hoek-Brown simulations to develop full stress deformation curves for typical pillars. The mine stiffness concept was introduced to determine the pillar load which automatically included the influence of the pillar and strata stiffness, excavation spans, pillar yield and failure. The factor of safety was obtained by dividing the pillar strength by the stress value of the intersection point of the two linear equations for the stiffness of the system and the pillar respectively. The proposed methodology was calibrated by applying it to two mines in the Bushveld. The conclusion was that the methodology is a significant improvement over the one in use. It was shown that a combination of the FLAC2D Hoek Brown and the System Pillar Equilibrium Concept can predict the extent of the fracture zones and, to certain extent, the pillar stresses. The stage has been reached where the methodology can be used to predict the most likely commencement of failure of pillars at greater depth and alternative pillar mining methods can be modelled. / MT2017

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Johannesburg, 1992. / This thesis presents the results of theoretical and experimental investigations into the behaviour and ultimate load capacity of latticed lower panels with cross-bracing diagonals made of equal-leg, hot-rolled steel angles under the effects of in-plane loads. Loading tests to collapse are carried out on cross-bracings in reduced-scale two-dimensional frames of various arrangements. The Southwell-plot of deflection measurements immediately prior to first yield of the diagonals is used to define equivalent end eccentricities and effective length factors, which therefore account for geometric and material imperfections of the test specimens. A proposal for new design formulae for calculating the resistance of struts is presented. The new design equations are based on the secant formula and are calibrs"ed against the experimental results. A computer model is developed based on flexibility equations which do not require an narative analysis procedure. The non-linear effects are given through the inclusion of Berry stability functions. The effects of eccentric forces and nodal restraints are simulated at all joints in which diagonals and main chords are connected . An additional model is formulated using a mainframe finite-element cod, demonstrating that it is now possible to perform non-linear analyses of complex frames including asymmetric members. Experimental results from this and other investigations are compared with ultimate load predictions based on the new design equations and the computer models and also usual buckling curves for design of steel transmission towers. In all cases the proposed models give acceptable predictions ot the behaviour and ultimate capacity of the bracings. In particular, failure loads calculated with the new design equations show improvements with respect to predictions based on current design buckling curves. These equations, therefore, can be used for design of steel latticed tower structures with angle members.

The objective of this research is to determine if the deflection equations currently adopted in ACI 440.1r-15 and previously ACI 440.1r-06 accurately reflect the flexural behavior of an overreinforced Basalt Fiber Reinforced Polymer (BFRP) concrete beam. This was accomplished with experimental, analytical and numerical models. The experiment consisted of two beams doublyreinforced with BFRP rebar. A three-point flexural test on beams with a 30 in. clear span was performed and the deflections were recorded with a dial gauge and LVDT system. This data was compared to the equations from ACI 440.1r-06, ACI 440.1r-15, Branson’s equation and a numerical model created in ANSYS Mechanical APDL. Experimental results show a stiffer beam than expected when compared to the four predictive models for deflection. This can be due to the level of over-reinforcement and the small clear-span to depth ratio. Further research should be conducted to determine the cause for the additional stiffness. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Research, tests and analysis are presented on several reinforcements placed in the asphalt overlay of a roadway built over soft organic soils. Non-destructive Evaluation (NDE) methods and statistical analysis were used to characterize the pavement before and after rehabilitative construction. Before reconstruction, falling weight deflectometer, rut and ride tests were conducted to evaluate the existing pavement and determine the statistical variability of critical site characteristics. Twenty-four 500ft. test sections were constructed on the roadway including sixteen reinforced asphalt and eight control sections at two test locations that possessed significantly different subsoil characteristics. NDE tests were repeated after reconstruction to characterize the improvements of the test sections. Test results were employed to quantify the stiffness properties of the pavement based on load-deflection data to evaluate the relative performance of the reinforced sections. Statistical analysis of the data showed the stiffness of the reinforced sections was consistently higher than the control sections. / by Daniel D. Pohly. / Thesis (M.S.C.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Studies of composite multihull structure under wave loads, extreme loads, and blast loads have been conducted using finite element and computational fluid dynamics (CPF) tools. A comprehensive finite element tool for structural analysis of composite multi-hull structures is developed. Two-way fluid structure interaction (FSI) is implemented by coupling finite element analysis (FEA) and CFD. FEA models have been developed using sandwich construction having composite face sheets and a foam core. Fluid domain was modeled using the CFD code, CFX and a wave motion was simulated based on Sea State 5... In addition to hydrodynamic loads, the simulation of composite ship under extreme loads is performed. Stress analysis was performed and dynamic response of the hull was determined in time domain. In the final analysis, an underwater explosion model was developed to study the composite hull resistance to blast load. / by Siyuan Ma. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

Support vector machines (SVMs) are a set of supervised learning methods that have recently been applied for structural damage detection due to their ability to form an accurate boundary from a small amount of training data. During training, they require data from the undamaged and damaged structure. The unavailability of data from the damaged structure is a major challenge in such methods due to the irreversibility of damage. Recent methods create data for the damaged structure from finite element models. In this thesis we propose a new method to derive the dataset representing the damage structure from the dataset measured on the undamaged structure without using a detailed structural finite element model. The basic idea is to reduce the values of a copy of the data from the undamaged structure to create the data representing the damaged structure. The performance of the method in the presence of measurement noise, ambient base excitation, wind loading is investigated. We find that SVMs can be used to detect small amounts of damage in the structure in the presence of noise. The ability of the method to detect damage at different locations in a structure and the effect of measurement location on the sensitivity of the method has been investigated. An online structural health monitoring method has also been proposed to use the SVM boundary, trained on data measured from the damaged structure, as an indicator of the structural health condition.

"This study presents a general approach for an inverse problem to locate a sudden structural damage in a plate. The sudden damage is modeled as an impulse load and response data are collected at various sensor locations. In this simulation study the response data were generated by the commercial finite element code ANSYS for three square plates: one is an isotropic plate and made of aluminum and the others are two different composite plates made of graphite-epoxy. All plates are simply supported along all their edges. The responses of these plates to both narrow band and wide band loading were analyzed by a wavelet transform. The wavelet coefficient maps for each type of signal was utilized to estimate the shortest path arrival times of flexural waves resulted from the damage by locating the wavelet coefficient peak values of the response data. Using the dispersion relations of wave propagation based on the Mindlin’s plate theory, a set of nonlinear equations were derived to solve this inverse problem and the location of the applied load, which models a structural damage, was determined. The estimated locations for all different types of plates have shown an excellent agreement with the actual location of the impact loads applied. "

Structural identification is the inverse problem of estimating the physical parameters, e.g. element masses and stiffnesses, of a model representing a structural system, using response measurements obtained from the actual structure subjected to operational or well-defined experimental excitations. It is one of the principal focal areas of modal testing and structural health monitoring, with the identified model finding a wide variety of applications, from obtaining reliable response predictions to timely detection of structural damage (location and severity) and consequent planning and validating of maintenance/retrofitting operations. However, incomplete instrumentation of the monitored system and ambient vibration testing generally result in spatially incomplete and arbitrarily normalized measured modal information, often making the inverse problem ill-conditioned and resulting in non-unique identification results. The problem of parameter identifiability addresses the question of whether or not a parameter set of interest can be identified from the available information. The identifiability of any parameter set of interest depends on the number and location of sensors on the monitored system. In this dissertation we study the identifiability of the mass and stiffness parameters of shear-type systems, including 3-dimensional laterally-torsionally coupled rigid floor systems, with incomplete instrumentation, simultaneous to the development of algorithms to identify the complete mass and stiffness matrices of such systems. Both input-output and output-only situations are considered, and mode shape expansion and mass normalization approaches are developed to obtain the complete mass normalized mode shape matrix, starting from the incomplete modal parameters identified using any suitable experimental or operational modal analysis technique. Methods are discussed to decide actuator/sensor locations on the structure which will ensure identifiability of the mass and stiffness parameters. Several possible minimal and near-minimal instrumentation set-ups are also identified. The minimal a priori information necessary in output-only situations is determined, and different scenario of available a priori information are considered. Additionally, tests for identifiability are discussed for both pre- and post-experiment applications. The different theoretical discussions are illustrated using numerical simulations and experimental data. It is shown that the proposed identification algorithms are able to obtain reliably accurate physical parameter estimates even under the constraints of minimal instrumentation, minimal a priori information, and unmeasured input. The different actuator/sensor placement rules and identifiability tests are useful for both experiment design purposes, to determine the necessary number and location of sensors, as well as in identifying possibilities of multiple solutions post-experiment. The parameter identification methods are applied for structural health monitoring using experimental data, and an approach is discussed for probabilistic characterization of structural damage location and severity. A perturbation based uncertainty propagation approach is also discussed for the identification of the distributions of mass and stiffness parameters, reflecting the variability in the test structure, using very limited measured and a priori information.

A Bayesian approach to system identification for structural control and health monitoring contains three main levels of inference, namely model assessment, joint state/parameter estimation and noise estimation. All of them have individually, or as a whole, been studied extensively for offline applications. In an online setting, the middle level of inference (joint state/parameter estimation) is performed using various algorithms such as the Kalman filter (KF), the extended Kalman filter (EKF), the Unscented Kalman filter (UKF), or particle filter (PF) methods. This problem has been explored in depth for structural dynamics. This dissertation focuses on the other two levels of inference, in particular on developing methods to perform them online, simultaneously to the joint state/parameter estimation. The quality of structural parameter estimates depends heavily on the choice of noise characteristics involved in the aforementioned online inference algorithms, hence the need for simultaneous online noise estimation. Model assessment, on the other hand, is an integral part of many engineering applications, since any analytical or numerical mathematical model used for predictive purposes is only an approximation of the real system. An online implementation of model assessment is valuable, amongst others, for structural control applications, and for identifying several models in parallel, some of which might be of deteriorating nature, thus generating some sort of alert. The performance of the proposed online techniques is evaluated using simulated and experimental data sets generated by nonlinear hysteretic systems. Upon completion of the study of hierarchical online system identification (diagnostic phase/estimation), a system/damage prognostic analysis (prognostic phase/prediction) is attempted using a gamma deterioration process. Prognostic analysis is still at a relatively early stage of development in the field of structural dynamics, but it can potentially provide useful insights regarding the lifetime of a dynamically excited structural system. The technique is evaluated on a data set recorded during an experiment involving a full-scale bridge pier under base excitation, tested to impending collapse.