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Many engineering structures are made of composite materials or metal foam. To simulate the deformational behaviour of these structures often requires a high number of discretisation elements. This in turn yields a very large system of linear equations that are extremely time and memory consuming or practically impossible to solve. It is therefore desirable to find an approach to overcome this obstacle.
By means of a small-scale truss bridge, the ability of the Measurement- and Model-based Structural Analysis to detect and localize damage was examined. Although there was no noteworthy difficulty in detecting damage, it turned out that damage localization responds sensitively to systematic influences, i.e. non-modelled properties of the mechanical model. Therefore, another experiment is being conducted to re-examine the Measurement- and Model-based Structural Analysis. For this purpose, the bending test is carried out as it has been already theoretically respectively numerically discussed. In this attempt, the systematic influences such as residual stress are kept as low as possible.
The best-known discretization methods for solving engineering problems formulated as partial differential equations are finite difference method (FDM), finite element method (FEM) and finite volume method (FVM). While the finite volume method is used in fluid mechanics, the finite element method is predominant in solid state mechanics. At first glance, FVM and FEM are two highly specialized methods. However, both methods can solve problems of both solid mechanics and fluid mechanics well. Since experimental mechanics deals not only with solid state physics but also with fluid mechanics problems, we want to understand FVM in the sense of FEM in this work. In the long term, we want to use the variational calculus to unify many important numerical methods in engineering science into a common framework. In this way, we expect that experiences can be better exchanged between different engineering sciences and thus innovations in the field of experimental mechanics can be advanced. But in this work, we limit ourselves to the understanding of the FVM with the help of the variational calculus already known in FEM. We use a simple 1D Poisson equation to clarify the point. First, we briefly summarize the FVM and FEM. Then we will deal with the actual topic of this paper, as we establish the FEM and the FVM on a common basis by variation formulation. It is shown here that the FVM can be understood in terms of the finite element method with the so-called Galerkin-Petrov approach.
To examine the capability to detect and localise damage using the Measurement- and Model-based Structural Analysis (MeMoS), a small-scale truss bridge (1520 mm × 720 mm × 720 mm) made of aluminium profiles is built as a test specimen for this purpose. The truss frame of the test bridge is made of aluminium profiles with a sophisticated design of the cross-sectional area. In comparison, with solid profiles, only a fraction of the material is needed to produce the profiles, while their bending resistance decreases slightly. The profiles are built into a truss frame by connecting them by means of fastening sets made of steel. The bridge model is mounted on four steel bearings which each of them consist of a cylinder arranged between two plates. Fixed bearings are made by holding onto one end of the bridge. The bridge is subjected by an external load by placing a heavy object beneath it. At the same time, measurements can be conducted below the bridge. Therefore, the bridge specimen is elevated by attaching it on a pedestal with four columns. Damages can be induced by loosening the fastening pieces.