Quasi real-time and continuous non-stationary strain estimation in bottom-fixed offshore structures by multimetric data fusion

Offshore structures are generally exposed to harsh environments such as strong tidal currents and wind loadings. Monitoring the structural soundness and integrity of offshore structures is crucial to prevent catastrophic collapses and to prolong their lifetime; however, it is intrinsically challenging because of the difficulties in accessing the critical structural members that are located under water for installing and repairing sensors and data acquisition systems. Virtual sensing technologies have the potential to alleviate such difficulties by estimating the unmeasured structural responses at the desired locations using other measured responses. Despite the usefulness of virtual sensing, its performance and applicability to the structural health monitoring of offshore structures have not been fully studied to date. This study investigates the use of virtual sensing of offshore structures. A Kalman filter based virtual sensing algorithm is developed to estimate responses at the location of interest. Further, this algorithm performs a multi-sensor data fusion to improve the estimation accuracy under non-stationary tidal loading. Numerical analysis and laboratory experiments are conducted to verify the performance of the virtual sensing strategy using a bottom-fixed offshore structural model. Numerical and experimental results show that the unmeasured responses can be reasonably recovered from the measured responses.