Due to structural damages from earthquakes and strong winds, engineers and scientists have focused on performance based design methods and sensors directly measuring relative displacements. Among the monitoring methods being considered include those using Global Positioning System (GPS) technology. However, as the technical feasibility of using GPS for recording relative displacements has been (and is still being) proven, the challenge for users is to determine how to make use of the relative displacements being recorded. This thesis proposes a mathematical framework that supports the use of RTK-GPS and multisensor data for structural monitoring. Its main contributions are as follows: (a) Most of the emerging GPS-based structural monitoring systems consist of GPS receiver arrays (dozens or hundreds deployed on a structure), and the issue of integrity of the GPS data generated must be addressed for such systems. Based on this recognition, a methodology for integrity monitoring using a data redundancy approach has been proposed and tested for a multi-antenna measurement environment. The benefit of this approach is that it verifies the reliability of both the measuring instruments and the processed data contrary to the existing methods that only verifies the reliability of the processed data. (b) For real-time structural monitoring applications, high frequency data ought to be generated. A methodology that can extract, in real-time, deformation parameters from high frequency RTK measurements is proposed. The methodology is tested and shown to be effective for determining the amplitude and frequency of structural dynamics. Thus, it is suitable for the dynamic monitoring of towers, tall buildings and long span suspension bridges. (c) In the overall effort of deformation analysis, large quantities of observations are required, both of causative phenomena (e.g., wind velocity, temperature, pressure), and of response effects (e.g., accelerations, coordinate displacements, tilt, strain, etc.). One of the problems to be circumvented is that of dealing with excess data generated both due to process automation and the large number of instruments employed. This research proposes a methodology based on multivariate statistical process control whose benefit is that excess data generated on-line is reduced, while maintaining a timely response analysis of the GPS data (since they can give direct coordinate results). Based on the above contributions, a demonstrator software system was designed and implemented for the Windows operating system. Tests of the system with datasets from UNSW experiments, the Calgary Tower monitoring experiment in Canada, the Xiamen Bank Building monitoring experiment in China, and the Republic Plaza Building monitoring experiment in Singapore, have shown good results.
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/187799 |
Date | January 2002 |
Creators | Ogaja, Clement, Surveying & Spatial Information Systems, Faculty of Engineering, UNSW |
Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Surveying and Spatial Information Systems |
Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
Language | English |
Detected Language | English |
Rights | Copyright Clement Ogaja, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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