Plenary Lecture
Significance of Structural Health Monitoring in Cultural Heritage Structures
Associate Professor Ahmet Turer
Structural Mechanics Laboratory
Civil Engineering Department
Middle East Technical University
Turkey
E-mail: aturer@metu.edu.tr
Abstract: Monitoring of modern and special civil engineering structures, extraordinary ones such as long span bridges, high rise buildings, deep tunnels, are under continuous control by measurement devices; which is commonly referred as Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). The main concept behind SHM is to place necessary amount of gages at critical locations in a structure to evaluate its status in time and even generate warning signals in the form of audible alarms or SMS messages if measurements exceed predefined damage limits; which is commonly defined as smart structures. This technology has also been implemented on cultural heritage structures since they are irreplaceably valuable and very important structures. This lecture gives a brief background on SHM and application of monitoring techniques on cultural heritage structures while putting emphasis on commonly used sensors and datalogger types. Interesting monitoring examples will be provided showing detectable structural changes on historic structures that undergo restoration work and could have been otherwise lead to undesirable effects if monitoring was not performed. Other monitoring types of short monitoring for dynamic testing will be discussed and relevance to finite element model calibration will be discussed.
Brief Biography of the Speaker: Dr Ahmet Turer received his B.S. (High Honor, 1993) in Civil Engineering from Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, then M.S. (1997) and PhD (2000) degrees from University of Cincinnati (UC), Ohio-USA. He worked as a structural engineer and project planner between 1993-1995 in Turkey as well as research assistant and part-time structural engineer in USA. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ahmet Turer has been a full time faculty member at METU Civil engineering department since 2000 and specialized on structural analysis, monitoring, condition evaluation of historic structures and bridges. He is the author of close to 100 conference and international pier reviewed journal papers. He received science award from Istanbul Kultur University in 2007 for his innovative work on developing strengthening techniques using scrap tires for non-engineered masonry rural houses self-constructed by poor occupants. He serves as the head of Special and Tall Structures Research Center at METU.