APPLICATION CASE: PROTOTYPE OF RADAR TOWER STRUCTURAL HEALTH MONITORING SYSTEM

Industrial and civil structures like bridges, wind turbines, pipelines etc., are widely present in rural area. To maintain functionality of these structures, their condition is controlled using Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). SHM assists engineers in finding early structural defects like cracks, deformations, material deterioration, metal fatigue and so on. Monitoring can prevent accidents from happening by giving early warnings and a chance to perform necessary repairs and adjustments to the structure. It is efficient and economically reasonable to have possibility to perform planned repairs well ahead, instead of doing urgent fixing. What is more important, structural condition monitoring improves safety along with reducing maintenance costs. There are numerous non-destructive techniques (ultrasound, Fiber Bragg Grating, acoustic emission) applied for SHM, but the focus of this paper is on vibration-based methods, particularly - Operational Modal Analysis (OMA). The aim of the study is to validate SHM application possibility for a full scale industrial structure using the Operational Modal Analysis based SHM system. The system is designed as a cost-effective solution, mainly by using cheap piezo film deformation sensors and utilizing multi-patch OMA technique. A test was performed and modal parameters of the radar tower were obtained and compared with the FE model. The possibility to perform SHM on an industrial structure was validated.