Modern damage measurement of structural elements: Experiment, terrestrial laser scanning, and numerical studies

In this modern era of civilization, with the rise of construction of structures worldwide, there has been an increasing demand for structural health monitoring and assessment, which ensures the durability and stability of structural life. Terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) is one of those state-of-the-art technologies which has simplified the structural survey and assessment. TLS can rapidly acquire millions of 3D data points from an entire structural surface with high precision in a short period of time, encompassing the physical position and geometrical details of the subjected object in the form of a digital replica known as Digital Twin (DT). A Digital Twin is the set of all digitally represented data, which can greatly benefit engineers in terms of generating a realistic 3D model of the structure and identifying the structural deformities such as deformations, displacements, surface anomalies/irregularities, etc. Despite the significant benefit of this technology, there has been limited research studies on its application and evaluation in terms of accuracy in structural monitoring and assessment. Therefore, this research paper aims to provide an experimental program that not only measures and quantifies the performance of TLS, but also evaluates its accuracy in comparison to other conventional single-point measurement equipment. In this regard, a simply supported structural beam has been considered as a structural object and subjected to monotonic loading. Meanwhile, the deformation of the beam has been captured using a few methods including TLS. The finding of this research showed that the TLS performed remarkable well with errors less than 2% compared to other accurate approaches of measurements.