Exploring civil structure dynamics through ground-based interferometric radar and augmented reality integration

Saeed Sotoudeh

School of Computing and Engineering

Supervisors:

Professor Fabio Tosti

School of Computing and Engineering

Dr Stephen Uzor

School of Computing and Engineering

Ensuring safety in civil infrastructures is a crucial measure that structural health monitoring (SHM) techniques are focused on. Amongst variety of monitoring sensors in the literature, ground based interferometric radar (GBIR) systems have attracted enormous attention in recent years due to their advantages such as high precision fast data collection compared to traditional methods.

The current research focuses on investigating the dynamic responses of the structures monitored by GBIR system aided with augmented reality (AR) for system control. AR assisted in controlling the position of the targets inside the radars beam of radiation and investigating the different acquisition scenarios such as position of the targets or multiple targets inside the same range. Dynamic excitations applied via light weight deflectometer (LWD). Further, loading effect in different scenarios was investigated by going through the signal properties using empirical mode decomposition (EMD) signal processing technique. This gives a good understanding about the hidden features inside the signal in complex situations such as multiple targets as EMD simplifies the signal in various layers. The results show that for accurate data collection using GBIR system, AR can boost the quality of the data by controlling the data collection and EMD can give a deep understanding of the signal from GBIR.