creator Venkitaraman, Shyamala advisor Modares, Mehdi Health assessment and damage detection for existing structures is an essential procedure for their safe and reliable operation so that any catastrophic failure may be prevented in a timely manner. However, results obtained from a health assessment of a structure possess uncertainties in measurements, system properties and loads. Furthermore, the conventional deterministic structural analyses are incapable of considering these uncertainties, thereby resulting in error when estimating the state of health of a structure. Interval (unknown-but-bounded) representation is one method to quantify uncertainty in a physical system. Using an interval variable, the uncertain parameter is bounded between extreme values. In this work, a new method for damage assessment of structures is developed that utilizes the results from structural health assessment as uncertain input parameters in an interval finite element analysis scheme. This method, due to its capability of considering uncertainties, offers a more robust process for estimating the possible existence of damage and overall health of the structure. As an illustrative example, the method is applied for a failed sign support structure. First, the structure's response from previous health assessment procedure was used to construct uncertain interval responses. Then using these interval responses as input parameters, an interval finite element method was performed. The results of the analysis verify and correlate with the failure location of the actual structure. Moreover, the lifetime assessment of the structure obtained from this method is the lower bound of, and correlates with the actual failure time of the structure. Submitted by Dana Lamparello (dlampare@iit.edu) on 2012-08-21T19:35:23Z No. of bitstreams: 2 thesis_review1.pdf: 764520 bytes, checksum: 1fe5b91fd322a0b5afb1db7752849b4f (MD5) front_page.pdf: 115905 bytes, checksum: 30fa69b396b0077f4555189d4758b949 (MD5) Made available in DSpace on 2012-08-21T19:35:23Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 thesis_review1.pdf: 764520 bytes, checksum: 1fe5b91fd322a0b5afb1db7752849b4f (MD5) front_page.pdf: 115905 bytes, checksum: 30fa69b396b0077f4555189d4758b949 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-05 M.S. in Civil Engineering, May 2012 2012-04-16 2012-05 http://hdl.handle.net/10560/2814 en Thesis born digital application/pdf In Copyright http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/ Restricted Access CAEE / Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering Illinois Institute of Technology Affiliated department