A dynamic strain prediction method for malfunction of sensors in buildings subjected to seismic loads using CWT and CNN

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is a technique used to evaluate the safety of a structure based on the structural response. In the SHM, sensors may fail to measure the structural response, or data loss can occur during the data transmission and reception. In this regard, this paper proposes a method of predicting the strain response when a sensor installed in a structural member suffers a malfunction. To this end, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is introduced to predict the strain response. Time-history strain data for seismic loads measured in adjacent structural members are set as the input layer of the CNN, and continuous wavelet transform (CWT) results are additionally set in the input layer of the CNN to reflect the dynamic structural behavior during earthquakes in the CNN predictions. Time-history strain data for a member, the target of prediction, are set as the output layer of the CNN. Then, the trained CNN uses the time-history strain data of adjacent members with no sensor failure and the CWT result of the data to predict the strain response of a structural member with sensor failure. A numerical study on the seismic load of a single-span three-story steel moment frame and an experimental study on a single-span three-story reinforced concrete frame were carried out to verify the validity of the proposed method. This study presents a method of applying CWT data to the input layer of the CNN and discusses the effectiveness of CWT data for predicting the nonlinear response of a structural member with damaged sensors.