Monitoring onsite‐temperature prediction error for condition monitoring of civil infrastructures

An inverse input–output method is proposed for long‐term condition monitoring of civil infrastructures through monitoring the prediction error of air temperature recorded at the site of a structure. It is known that structural natural frequencies are affected by temperature. Hence, the proposed method considers the structural natural frequencies as input and temperature as output to train a machine learning algorithm (MLA). To this end, after signal preprocessing using the variational mode decomposition (VMD), different MLAs are employed, and the error associated with this prediction is regarded as damage–sensitive feature. It is hypothesised and further confirmed through solving numerical and benchmark problems that the prediction error deviates significantly from the upper bond control limit of an R‐chart (errors signal) constructed based on the prediction error of temperature as soon as the damage occurs. The frequency–temperature scatter plots indicate a linear dependency between the natural frequencies and temperature. Moreover, the similar slope obtained for the regression line fitted to different frequency–temperature scatter plots indicates high collinearity among pairs of natural frequencies. This observation implies that an interaction term must be considered for such pairs of natural frequencies in the linear regression model. The results of both numerical and experimental studies further confirm that the interaction linear regression model is the most accurate machine learning algorithm for solving the inverse problem of predicting temperature using natural frequencies for condition monitoring of structures. The results of the proposed method are also compared with the direct strategy, whereby its superiority is demonstrated.