EASEC 11 Taipei November 30, 2008
Posted by dionsiringo in proceeding, visit.add a comment
This month I had a chance to attend the 11th East-Asia Pacific Conference on Structural Engineering (EASEC) in Taipei, Taiwan. It was a good conference, with many subjects and some of them are becoming very popular in civil engineering. The main topic of conference in structural engineering. This year special theme is about sustainability in civil engineering. The host of the conference is National University of Taiwan, which have done a tremendous work to put out such a good organization and arrangement.
with former advisor Prof. Iswandi Imran of ITB
This year conference is special because it was chaired by my prof, Prof. Fujino, so that many participants are from our research group. As always, conference is a good opportunity to learn what people have been doing and also to develop a network. I met a lot of old colleagues from previous EASEC conference (Bali 2003), and several alumni as well as my former lectures from ITB. I wrote two papers in this conference, one is a keynote as the second author co-written with Prof. Fujino and the other as the first author.
presenting a paper
Taipei itself is a nice city, a little similar with Jakarta but more humane. Transportation is not as good as it is in Tokyo, but they are cheap and readily available. Taxi fares in particular are very reasonable, while subway network is not as dense as it is in Tokyo, so we need to walk a lot to reach our destination when using subway.
Me with Taipei 101 on the background
The most obvious place in Taipei is Taipei 101 tower. It is the tallest existing building in the world, soon to be replaced by Burj Dubai. I had a chance to visit the building by taking the world’s fastest elevator. The building is equipped with TMD to prevent lateral vibration. In fact the elevator itself is equipped with control system.
IABSE Chicago and UIUC Trip October 1, 2008
Posted by dionsiringo in Structural Monitoring, Vibration, proceeding, visit.add a comment
Last week I attended the 17th IABSE Congress in Chicago. My colleague Dr. Nagayama presented a paper with me as the a co writer. The conference was great. Most of participants are engineers from big firms and famous consultants companies. Few are from academics. This sort of mixed audience is good for a change. It’s always a good thing to get feedbacks from engineers.
This is the paper presented at IABSE congress. It’s a modification of our previous works on bridge monitoring using ambient and seismic response. There are lots of paper that are very interesting to me, especially about long span bridge and tall building. I’ll post them next time.
Couple of days before IABSE Conference we visited the UIUC at Urbana-Champaign, where I visited Prof. Spencer’s Lab and participated on measurement of an old truss bridge using IMOTE2. The measurement was lead by Nagayama, couple of students from UIUC assisted us. It was a great experience. The collaboration was featured in UIUC research buletin.
Monitoring of bridges and transportation infrastructures using vibration techniques July 15, 2007
Posted by dionsiringo in Bridge Engineering, Jembatan Cable-stayed, Jembatan Suspensi, Structural Monitoring, Vibration, proceeding.1 comment so far
The rapid growth of Japanese economy during the 1960’s intensified construction of bridges and transportation infrastructures system to meet the expansion of industrial activities. Since then, the total infrastructure stocks have accumulated considerably. These include development of national railway line and the highway networks that are still continuing until now. In twenty years from now, the bridges constructed around seventies will be more than fifty years old. Without proper maintenance they will be deteriorating and degradating in function. It is anticipated that by the year 2020 the number of aging road bridges will constitute half of the total road bridge networks. Consequently, even though Japan has been long considered as a country that is active in new construction of infrastructures, maintenance has becoming an increasingly important issue nowadays.
Maintenance, however, is not only the issue for aging bridges and transportation infrastructures but also for the newly constructed ones. In order to maintain infrastructure condition continuously, comprehensive monitoring systems have been introduced at the beginning at its service life. Many newly constructed bridges especially the long-span ones are now being closely monitored. They are instrumented with embedded sensors that allow continuous –and in some cases, online monitoring. For smaller scale bridges, the monitoring process constitutes routine inspection using portable sensors. A routine inspection or an overall monitoring of bridge after certain severe natural environmental condition such as earthquake provides a tool to evaluate structures condition and to detect possible structural defects. For this purpose, the vibration based SHM is considered superior to other non-destructive assessment methods due to its characteristics that allow for global system monitoring as well as detection of local structural defects determined from changes in the vibration characteristics.
