Customer: EE, DG XIII

Duration: September 1998 – October 2001

Today there are neither industrially standarised or reliable methods nor quantitative and objective guidelines for the in-service structural health monitoring of high safety and cost structures. Such structures are large in size, exprensive to build and to maintain, usually one-off designs which are susceptible to eventual and sudden damage. Typical examples of them are found amongst other in the Construction, Aerospace, Off-shore, Power Generation, machine Toll and Transport Industries: highway bridges, dome-shaped roof trusses, spacecraft antennas, flight and railway vehicles, off shores structures, etc. The ultimate industrial objective of AMADEUS is to develop methods, procedures and guidelines for routine, non-destructive, in-service maintenance monitoring and damage detection in these type of structures. While within the limits of precompetiveness the thus developed “know how” of AMADEUS will be consolidated onto autonomous PC based expert systems capable of on site structural assessment.
The proposed development work is a three pronged task involving test measurements, theoretical modeling and comparisons of the resulting two types of data. On one hand, the basic theoretical approach is the formulation of very accurate behaviour will be contrasted to identify possible structural alteration. This alteration of this structure will then be “reproduced” on the model. The changes that need to be made to the model in order to reproduce the altered state will pin-point the changes or damage of the in-service structure. On the other hand, the in-service structural characterizations will be oprtimised by advanced developments in the measurements procedures i.e. type of measured quantities, optimum sensor placement, accuracy etc. Finally a mixed modeling approach will be applied via the training and use of Neural Networks for damage detection.

Role of TREDIT:
– UI development
– Participation in the development of the diagnostic tool
– Participation in the Exploitation and Dissemination strategy