Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The current research proposal is focused on the development and optimization of a new Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) for offshore concrete and steel infrastructure for the harsh North Atlantic Environment. The project objective is to identify the appropriate structural health monitoring system components suitable for the harsh North Atlantic. The SHM is an emerging important tool for diagnosing deterioration, damage detection, maintenance and management of civil infrastructures. Concrete offshore structures are built using thick high strength concrete plates. The crack control of offshore concrete structure sustained under service loads will be investigated. A SHM system with various types of sensors will be recommended for a new offshore structure for monitoring the in-service performance. However, a novel acoustic or wave transmission technique will be investigated for tracking concrete damage in an existing concrete offshore. The possible methods that can be used efficiently for detecting cracks in thick heavily reinforced offshore concrete plates are acoustic emission, impact echo and shear wave techniques. The suitability of each will be assessed for offshore monitoring. The techniques are based on identification of changes in acoustic or wave form attenuation through concrete by comparing integrated wave form amplitudes recorded by two or more sensors. The multichannel random decrement method will be applied for a steel offshore hull to extract the modal properties of the structural component and identify the damage existence and location. The best locations to excite a steel offshore hull structural component will be determined and a repair strengthens technique will be recommended using the general structural assessment principles. The neural network technique can be used in combination with the random decrement technique or data scan or wave scan to detect damages in offshore structures.