SMART BUILDINGS: SYNERGY IN STRUCTURAL CONTROL, HEALTH MONITORING AND ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS

Oral Defense By: Tat S. FuSonny AstaniDepartment of Civil and Environmental EngineeringAbstract:
Smart buildings are different from traditional buildings in their ability to react to external and internal building conditions and provide building functions that concern safety, comfort and energy efficiency. The capability to monitor and control different building systems makes a building smart. Efficient cooperation among various building systems is also crucial because of the increasing complexity in buildings. This dissertation focuses on structural control and health monitoring as well as integrating the structural system with an environmental system to create safe, energy efficient and smart buildings.
Structural health monitoring (SHM) aims to assess the health of structures in a systematic and automatic manner. Cost and reliability are the biggest challenges for SHM. A SHM system with a wireless sensor network is studied to reduce cost by avoiding expensive wiring in installation. To reduce radio communication and, thus, battery power usage on the wireless sensors, a distributed algorithm is used to process the data at the sensor nodes for estimating modal parameters. Optimization of a sensor placement is then studied for SHM purposes and wireless sensor networks. Reliability in damage detection is also examined for both global and local excitations. With the measured responses from exciting the structure globally, an SHM algorithm is expanded to conduct multi-directional analysis, providing more information and accuracy on damage detection. By exciting a structural member locally and studying the wave propagation within this member, damage is successfully detected and the effect of sensor placements on damage detection accuracy is analyzed.
Synergy of integrating structural and environmental systems is explored with a proposed Shading Fin Mass Damper (SFMD) system. Traditionally static shading fins are made movable and heavier to function as mass dampers. The added mobility allows the fins to change positions for greater sunlight control, thus minimizing energy consumption on cooling and heating loads. Since the shading fins are placed along the height of the building, the dampers are distributed rather than concentrated in a few locations as in typical tuned mass damper systems. Passive, active and semiactive control strategies are analyzed for the distributed mass damper (DMD) system; results show that the DMD system can reduce structural vibration significantly. Additionally, the actuators controlling the movements of the SFMDs are studied to excite the structure for SHM. It is observed that by using combinations of the multiple actuators, damaged detection can be greatly improved for the DMD system.

Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Evangeline Reyes