Digital Twins-Based Impact Response Prediction of Prestressed Steel Structure

Civil infrastructure O&M requires intelligent monitoring techniques and control methods to ensure safety. Unfortunately, tedious modeling efforts and the rigorous computing requirements of large-scale civil infrastructure have hindered the development of structural research. This study proposes a method for impact response prediction of prestressed steel structures driven by digital twins (DTs) and machine learning (ML). The high-fidelity DTs of a prestressed steel structure were constructed from the perspective of both a physical entity and virtual entity. A prediction of the impact response of prestressed steel structure’s key parts was established based on ML, and a structure response prediction of the parts driven by data was realized. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed prediction method, the authors carried out a case study in an experiment of a prestressed steel structure. This study provides a reference for fusion applications with DTs and ML in impact response prediction and analysis of prestressed steel structures.