Condition Assessment of Tower and Mast Structures Monitored within One Cluster under Changing Environments

Numerous communications and power towers are distributed around urban districts. To ensure the safety of tower and mast structures, an effective measurement is to establish a simple structural health monitoring (SHM) system for each tower structure to obtain continuous deformation data of all structures. However, there is little research focusing on evaluating the condition of tower and mast structures monitored within one cluster using deformation monitoring data. To address this issue, a condition assessment approach combining principal component analysis (PCA) with cross-validation is proposed in this study. The PCA-based method is applied to mitigate the influence of environmental temperature and speed load on the horizontal displacement monitoring data, and novelty detection based on cross-validation is adopted to evaluate the condition of all the tower and mast structures monitored within one cluster. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated using monitoring data obtained from actual tower and mast structures.