ABSTRACT
In structural health monitoring (SHM) and structural vibration control (SVC), an accurate finite element (FE) model of a civil structure is often an essential tool to facilitate sensor and control device placement, control performance assessment and damage detection, among many others. A large civil structure, such as a tall building or a long-span bridge, is a complex structure comprising tens of thousands of structural components of different sizes connected to one another in different ways. Local damage often does not significantly affect the global responses of a structure, making global response-based damage analysis inaccurate and sometimes impossible. Moreover, the number of sensors in an SHM system for a large civil structure is limited and the sensors may not directly monitor the locations of structural defects. Therefore, the successful application of damage detection methods to large civil structures is very limited. Multi-scale FE modelling and analysis of a large civil structure have become necessary to provide both global and local structural information to enable a comprehensive assessment of structural safety, including damage detection and damage prognosis. Multi-scale FE modelling can also benefit control vibration performance if both global and local sensors can be used as feedback of state variables, and it may also facilitate the understanding of the interaction between the control devices and the structural components in SVC.
