Min-koo Kim

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University | PolyU · Department of Building and Real Estate

Piezoelectric transducers are being popularly used for sensing and actuation applications for smart structural systems. This chapter first deals with the basic principles of the piezoelectric transducers and the characteristics of piezoelectric materials. Then, various methodologies including guided wave, impedance, acoustic emission techniques, an...

Augmented reality (AR) technology assists construction workers by superimposing additional virtual information onto their real worksite environments. Ideally, this provides them with a better understanding of their tasks and hence boosts task performance. However, the additional information that AR places in users field of view could limit their ab...

Dimensional quality assessment (DQA) on the formwork and rebar of a reinforced concrete (RC) element is an important task for factory or field inspectors to ensure compliance with the blueprints prior to casting concrete. Current practice for the formwork and rebar DQA of RC elements relies on measurement-tape based manual inspection by qualified p...

Augmented reality (AR) is capturing increasing attention as a way to provide cognitive assistance in many fields. Inspiring from the benefits of AR, architecture, engineering and construction industries and researchers are interested to apply AR technologies for various construction tasks such as design review, assembly, inspection or facility main...

This chapter presents some opportunities that infrastructure computer vision (ICV) has provided for the subcontractors and fabricators. Subcontractors and fabricators need ICV to measure the progress of the work completed, to better understand and capture the status of the built environment, and to measure the quality of the fabricated components a...

Checking the geometric quality of each precast concrete (PC) element is an important task to ensure proper assemblage of PC elements on construction sites. As manual quality inspection is time-consuming and error-prone, previous studies have deployed 3D terrestrial laser scanning to collect the scan data of PC elements for automated geometric quali...

Geometric quality assessment (QA) of buildings and civil structures is an essential process in a construction project. Timely geometric QA is able to prevent construction delays and cost overruns, maintain the performance of in-service facilities, and extend their service life. Geometric QA based on manual measurement has been proven to be time-con...

Building information modelling (BIM) has been adopted in the construction industry. The success of BIM implementation relies on the accurate building information stored in BIM models. However, building information in BIM models can be inaccurate, out-of-date, or missing in real-world projects. 3D laser scanning has been leveraged to capture the acc...

Construction is an inherently less safe sector than other sectors because it exposes workers to harsh and dangerous working environments. The nature of the construction industry results in a comparatively high incidence of serious injuries and death caused by falls from a height, musculoskeletal disorders and being struck by objects. This paper pre...

Construction is an inherently less safe sector than other sectors because it exposes workers to harsh and dangerous working environments. The nature of the construction industry results in a comparatively high incidence of serious injuries and death caused by falls from a height, musculoskeletal disorders and being struck by objects. This paper pre...

Prefabrication has the advantages of simplicity, speed and economy but has been inflexible to changes in design which is a primary reason behind its limited market share in the construction industry. To tackle this drawback, this study presents a Robotic Prefabrication System (RPS) which employs a new concept called " re-fabrication " : the automat...

Prefabrication has the advantages of simplicity, speed and economy but has been inflexible to changes in design which is a primary reason behind its limited market share in the construction industry. To tackle this drawback, this study presents a Robotic Prefabrication System (RPS) which employs a new concept called “re-fabrication”: the automatic...

The authors regret an error in the authorship in the above manuscript. The correct authors and their affiliations are shown as follows. Qian Wanga,b, Min-Koo Kimc, Seongheum Yoonb, Jack C.P. Chenga, Hoon Sohnb,⁎aDepartment of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong bDepartment of Civil and...

This paper presents the suitability of precast components for standardized UK bridges. The conventional design and construction of UK bridges is often criticized for being inefficient and unsafe as the majority of the work is carried out on-site, which requires lots of time and temporary works. The concept of Design for Manufacture and Assembly (Df...

Precast concrete elements are widely used in the construction of buildings and civil infrastructures as they provide higher construction quality and requires less construction time. However, any abnormalities in precast concrete surfaces such as non-flatness or distortion, can influence the erection of the elements as well as the functional perform...

This paper analyses the suitability of precast components for standardised UK bridges. The conventional design and construction of UK bridges is often criticised for being inefficient and unsafe as the majority of the work is carried out on-site, which requires lots of time and temporary works. The concept of Design for Manufacture and Assembly (Df...

This study presents a system that inspects the dimensions of the side surfaces of precast concrete slabs using mirror-based laser scanning. Sides of precast concrete slab used for bridge constructions usually have a complex polygonal shape for key joints such as shear keys and flat ducts. Shear keys serve as transverse joints between two adjacent s...

Over a few decades, off-site construction (OSC) has been widely used for building and bridge constructions. OSC is a construction method that build structures at a different location than the location of use, and normally it occurs in a manufacturing plant. There are many studies on the perceived benefits of OSC, yet relatively few studies which qu...

Over the last few decades, precast concrete elements have become a popular component for construction projects. Since success of the precast concrete based construction comes from the dimensional conformability of individual precast concrete elements to their design specifications, checking the dimensional qualities of individual precast concrete e...

Precast concrete elements are becoming popular for construction of buildings and civil infrastructure. In order to prevent any system failure during the fabrication of precast concrete elements, a great care should be taken throughout the entire manufacturing process to ensure that the hardened concrete surfaces have desired properties in accordanc...

During construction and maintenance of concrete structures, it is important to achieve and preserve good surface quality of their components. The current quality assessment for concrete surfaces, however, heavily relies on manual inspection, which is time demanding and costly. This study presents a new technique that can simultaneously localize and...

For successful construction, it is important to ensure that the dimensions of precast concrete elements conform to the design specifications. The current methods of accessing the quality of precast concrete elements, however, rely largely on manual inspection and lack a systematic data storage and delivery system. To tackle these limitations, this...

Nowadays, precast concrete panels are one of the most popular construction components. To safeguard the overall quality of construction projects, it is important to ensure that the dimensional quality of precast concretes conform to the design specifications. In order to achieve this, a terrestrial laser scanning (TLS)-based automated dimensional q...

Piezoelectric transducers are being commonly used for sensing and actuation applications for smart structural systems. In particular, they are widely used for structural health monitoring (SHM) thanks to such attractive characteristics as multi-functionality, nonintrusivity, light weight, low cost, rapid response time, and high repeatability. This...

Quality assessment of precast concrete panels is an important factor that affects overall quality of construction. As prefabrication becomes popular at construction sites, demands for automatic and accurate inspections of the dimensions of the precast concrete panels have increased. Current techniques for measuring the dimensions of precast concret...

There are increasing demands to apply structural health monitoring (SHM) techniques to bridge structures. To meet these demands, our group has developed a suite of local SHM techniques that can detect particular types of damage without using baseline data obtained from the pristine condition of a structure. They are coined as reference-free damage...

SUMMARY In this paper, an integrated impedance and guided wave (IIG) damage detection technique using permanently embedded lead zirconate titanate (PZT) transducers is advanced specifically for online monitoring of critical hot spots within a composite airplane wing structure. A full-scale airplane wing segment is designed and manufactured to valid...

The impedance based damage detection technique utilizing piezoelectric materials has become a promising and attractive tool for structural health monitoring due to its high sensitivity to small local damage. However, impedance signals are also sensitive to time-varying environmental and operational conditions, and these ambient variations can often...

The electro-mechanical (EM) signals from piezoelectric (PZT) wafers are investigated for reference-free damage diagnosis so that a notch in a plate can be detected without requiring direct comparison with a baseline EM signal. Two identical PZT wafers collocated on both surfaces of a plate are utilized for extracting the mode-converted Lamb wave si...

Impedance-based structural health monitoring (SHM) has been of great interest to many researchers. In general, conventional impedance-based damage detection techniques identify damage by comparing "current" impedance signals with "baseline" ones obtained from the pristine condition of a structure. However, structures in field are often subject to c...