Finite element model updating of civil engineering infrastructures: A literature review

There are many civil engineering structures in Australia that have experienced different functional deficiencies during their service lives due to the harsh environment, fatigue effect, extreme loads and aging. The current practice of for assessment of structures relies mostly on design conditions. According to a comprehensive review of the literature, current practice in Australian lacks effective techniques to investigate the performance of structures systematically. Assessment of structures is usually performed using simplified methods and design conditions. Besides, code of practice requires revisions such as those made to AS5100.7 to include an additional section for evaluation of existing structures using structural health monitoring (SHM) techniques. Therefore, there is a need to assess the integrity of structures through a holistic approach to satisfy the structural safety. One of the reliable methods to investigate the performance of structures is Finite Element Model Updating (FE model updating) which aims to generate the accurate finite element models (FEM)s of real structures. Availability of reliable FEMs of structures is beneficial in many aspects such as their applications in SHM, evaluation of load carrying capacity, damage detection and performance monitoring of structures in extreme conditions like an earthquake. This paper comprehensively reviewed the previous application of FE model updating in civil structural engineering in Australia and worldwide, clarified the main existing gaps and presented how to make the method more applicable in practice according to the recent advancement in the technology. It is recommended to address further two significant factors, as convergence accuracy and computational intensity mitigation, without sacrificing each other in the future studies. Also, it is proposed to include more of SHM techniques including FE model updating in the assessment of existing structures, and provide a systematic procedure for application of FE model updating in codified approach.