Monitoring of Structural Health and Geohazards

The cross-over will be of the methodological type, oriented around processes and techniques that are shared across multiple domains. Specifically, students from CE and AES will apply predominantly new methods related to the monitoring of civil structures, rock- and soil masses to problems originating in their own as well as other fields of study. The module consists of two units:

• Theory and Techniques [6 EC]

• Case Studies: Advanced monitoring of Structural Health and Geohazards [4 EC]

Unit 1:

Theory and Techniques [LO1, LO2, LO3, LO4, LO5]

The first unit provides the students with knowledge on the theory and techniques required to answer the questions: what, when, how, why and where to monitor? Parts of this unit will form natural extensions to what is taught in the MUDE, including brief recapitulations.

Weekly syllabus

Week 1: Introduction

• Degradation and failure mechanisms

• Relation loading and materials; mechanisms; time- en spatial scale

• Sensors and data acquisition

• Advanced signal processing (beyond MUDE)

Week 2: Inversion

• Inversion and quality assessment (including recap MUDE)

• Inversion for subsurface (layered) structures

• Prediction (Best Linear Unbiased Prediction, Kriging, Gaussian Process Regression)

Week 3: System identification and model updating

• System identification: EMA/OMA

• Deterministic (FE) model updating

• Bayesian inference in the context of structural health and geohazards monitoring

Week 4: Machine learning perspectives

• Feature engineering

• Deep learning

• Anomaly detection

Week 5: Exam

• Written exam (30%)

Unit 2:

Case studies: Advanced monitoring of structural health and geohazards [LO3, LO4, LO5, LO6]

Case studies covering a wide range of application domains will be presented, where a division is made between CE applications (bridge, railway, pavement, and wind turbine monitoring, stability of dykes and embankments), AES applications (soil mass movements and landslides, land subsidence, failure and fault reactivation due to gas extraction, short-term cyclic storage of fluids or resource mining), and applications relating to both fields of study (imaging of structures, rocks and the near surface, monitoring of acoustic emission and seismic activities). Each case study will be developed and supervised by the relevant, contributing research group. Students will work in groups of 2 on these case studies. Each case study comprises 2 ECTS. Insofar possible, each group will have representatives from both MSc programmes.

The last 4 weeks of the module are reserved solely for the case studies.

Weekly syllabus

Weeks 6-10:

• Introduction of the case studies

• If required: theory specific to the case study en monitoring approach used

• State-of-the-art review per case study