Xiangxiong Kong

Xiangxiong Kong

Historic structures are important for our society but could be prone to structural deterioration due to long service durations and natural impacts. Monitoring the deterioration of historic structures becomes essential for stakeholders to take appropriate interventions. Existing work in the literature primarily focuses on assessing the structural damage at a given moment instead of evaluating the development of deterioration over time. To address this gap, we proposed a novel five-component digital twin framework to monitor time-varying changes in historic structures. A testbed of a casemate in Fort Soledad on the island of Guam was selected to validate our framework. Using this testbed, key implementation steps in our digital twin framework were performed. The findings from this study confirm that our digital twin framework can effectively monitor deterioration over time, which is an urgent need in the cultural heritage preservation community.

Xiangxiong Kong, Danny Smyl

On June 24, 2021, a 12-story condominium building (Champlain Towers South) in Surfside, Florida partially collapsed, resulting in one of the deadliest building collapses in United States history with 98 people confirmed deceased. In this work, we analyze the collapse event using a video clip that is publicly available from social media. In our analysis, we apply computer vision algorithms to corroborate new information from the video clip that may not be readily interpreted by human eyes. By comparing the differential features against different video frames, our proposed method is used to quantify the falling structural components by mapping the directions and magnitudes of their movements. We demonstrate the potential of this video processing methodology in investigations of catastrophic structural failures and hope our approach may serve as a basis for further investigations into structure collapse events.