Multiple Damage Detection of an Offshore Helideck through the Two-Step Artificial Neural Network Based on the Limited Mode Shape Data.

A helideck is an essential structure in an offshore platform, and it is crucial to maintain its structural integrity and detect the occurrence of damage early. Because helidecks usually consist of complex lattice truss members, precise measurements are required for structural health monitoring based on accurate modal parameters. However, available sensors and data acquisition are limited. Therefore, we propose a two-step damage detection process using an artificial neural network. Based on the mode shape database collected from 137,400 damage scenarios by finite element analysis, the neural network in the first step was trained to estimate the mode shapes of the entire helideck model using the selected mode shape data obtained from the limited measuring points. Then, the neural network in the second step is consecutively trained to detect the location and amount of structural damage to individual parts. As a result, it is shown that the proposed procedure provides the damage detection capability with only a quarter of the entire mode shape data, while the estimation accuracy is sufficiently high compared to the single network directly trained using all mode shape data. It was also found that, compared to the network directly trained from the same data, the proposed technique tends to detect minor damages more accurately.

Structural Health Monitoring with Sensor Data and Cosine Similarity for Multi-Damages.

There is a large risk of damage, triggered by harsh ocean environments, associated with offshore structures, so structural health monitoring plays an important role in preventing the occurrence of critical and global structural failure from such damage. However, obstacles, such as applicability in the field and increasing calculation costs with increasing structural complexity, remain for real-time structure monitoring offshore. Therefore, this study proposes the comparison of cosine similarity with sensor data to overcome such challenges. As the comparison target, this method uses the rate of changes of natural frequencies before and after the occurrence of various damage scenarios, including not only single but multiple damages, which are organized by the experiment technique design. The comparison method alerts to the occurrence of damage using a normalized warning index, which enables workers to manage the risk of damage. By comparison, moreover, the case most similar with the current status is directly figured out without any additional analysis between monitoring and damage identification, which renders the damage identification process simpler. Plus, the averaged rate of errors in detection is suggested to evaluate the damage level more precisely, if needed. Therefore, this method contributes to the application of real-time structural health monitoring for offshore structures by providing an approach to improve the usability of the proposed technique.