A New Procedure for Damage Assessment of Prestressed Concrete Beams Using Artificial Neural Network

A damage assessment procedure has been developed using artificial neural network (ANN) for prestressed concrete beams. The methodology had been formulated using the results obtained from an experimental study conducted in the laboratory. Prestressed concrete (PSC) rectangular beams were cast, and pitting corrosion was introduced in the prestressing wires and was allowed to be snapped using accelerated corrosion process. Both static and dynamic tests were conducted to study the behaviour of perfect and damaged beams. The measured output from both static and dynamic tests was taken as input to train the neural network. Back propagation network was chosen for this purpose, which was written using the programming package MATLAB. The trained network was tested using separate test data obtained from the tests. A damage assessment procedure was developed using the trained network, it was validated using the data available in literature, and the outcome is presented in this paper.