Sustainability, Vol. 11, Pages 710: Flow Analysis and Damage Assessment for Concrete Box Girder Based on Flow Characteristics (Sustainability)

For a system such as the concrete structure, flow can be the dynamic field to describe the motion, interactions, or both in dynamic or static (Eulerian description) states. Further, various kinds of flow propagate through it from the very start to the end of its lifecycle (Lagrangian description) accompanied by rains, winds, earthquakes, and so forth. Meanwhile, damage may occur inside the structure synchronously, developing from micro- to macro-scale damage, and eventually destroy the structure. This study was conducted to clarify the content of flow which has been implicitly used in the damage detection, and to propose a flow analysis framework based on the combination data space and the theory of dissipative structure theory specifically for nondestructive examination in structural damage detection, which can theoretically standardize the mechanism by which flow characteristics vary, the motion of the structure, or the swarm behavior of substructures in engineering. In this paper, a destructive experiment (static loading experiment) and a following nondestructive experiment (impact hammer experiment) were conducted. According to the experimental data analysis, the changing of flow characteristics shows high sensitivity and efficient precision to distinguish the damage exacerbations in a structure. According to different levels of interaction (intensity) with the structure, the information flow can be divided into two categories: Destructive flow and nondestructive flow. The method used in this research is named as a method of “flow analysis based on flow characteristics”, i.e., “FC-based flow analysis”.