• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.42 no.3
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• pp.425-448
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• 2012

In this paper, a new damage detection and quantification method has been presented to perform detection and quantification of structural damage under ambient vibration loadings. To extract modal properties of the structural system under ambient excitation, natural excitation technique (NExT) and eigensystem realization algorithm (ERA) are employed. Sensitivity matrices of the dynamic residual force vector have been derived and used in the parameter subset selection method to identify multiple damaged locations. In the sequel, the steady state genetic algorithm (SSGA) is used to determine quantified levels of the identified damage by minimizing errors in the modal flexibility matrix. In this study, performance of the proposed damage detection and quantification methodology is evaluated using a finite element model of a truss structure with considerations of possible experimental errors and noises. A series of numerical examples with five different damage scenarios including a challengingly small damage level demonstrates that the proposed methodology can efficaciously detect and quantify damage under noisy ambient vibrations.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.489-500
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• 2009

The aim of this paper is to compare wavelet, kurtosis and pseudofractal based techniques for structural health monitoring in the presence of measurement noise. A detailed comparison and assessment of these techniques have been carried out in this paper through numerical experiments for the calibration of damage extent of a simply supported beam with an open crack serving as an illustrative example. The numerical experiments are deemed critical due to limited amount of experimental data available in the field of singularity based detection of damage. A continuous detectibility map has been proposed for comparing various techniques qualitatively. Efficiency surfaces have been constructed for wavelet, kurtosis and pseudofractal based calibration of damage extent as a function of damage location and measurement noise level. Levels of noise have been identified for each technique where a sudden drop of calibration efficiency is observed marking the onset of damage masking regime by measurement noise.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.63 no.6
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• pp.779-788
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• 2017

System identification and damage detection for structural health monitoring have received considerable attention. Various time domain analysis methodologies based on measured vibration data of structures have been proposed. Among them, recursive least-squares estimation of structural parameters which is also known as parametric Kalman filter (PKF) approach has been studied. However, the conventional PKF requires that all the external excitations (inputs) be available. On the other hand, structural uncertainties are inevitable for civil infrastructures, it is necessary to develop approaches for probabilistic damage detection of structures. In this paper, a parametric Kalman filter with unknown inputs (PKF-UI) is proposed for the simultaneous identification of structural parameters and the unmeasured external inputs. Analytical recursive formulations of the proposed PKF-UI are derived based on the conventional PKF. Two scenarios of linear observation equations and nonlinear observation equations are discussed, respectively. Such a straightforward derivation of PKF-UI is not available in the literature. Then, the proposed PKF-UI is utilized for probabilistic damage detection of structures by considering the uncertainties of structural parameters. Structural damage index and the damage probability are derived from the statistical values of the identified structural parameters of intact and damaged structure. Some numerical examples are used to validate the proposed method.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.67 no.4
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• pp.327-336
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• 2018

In this study, an efficient damage index is proposed to identify multiple damage cases in structural systems using the concepts of frequency response function (FRF) matrix and strain energy of a structure. The index is defined based on the change of strain energy of an element due to damage. For obtaining the strain energy stored in elements, the columnar coefficients of the FRF matrix is used. The new indicator is named here as frequency response function strain energy based index (FRFSEBI). In order to assess the performance of the proposed index for structural damage detection, some benchmark structures having a number of damage scenarios are considered. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed index even with considering noise can accurately identify the actual location and approximate severity of the damage. In order to demonstrate the high efficiency of the proposed damage index, its performance is also compared with that of the flexibility strain energy based index (FSEBI) provided in the literature.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.221-237
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• 2015

An integrated method is proposed for structural nonlinear damage detection based on time series analysis and the higher statistical moments of structural responses in this study. It combines the time series analysis, the higher statistical moments of AR model residual errors and the fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering techniques. A few comprehensive damage indexes are developed in the arithmetic and geometric mean of the higher statistical moments, and are classified by using the FCM clustering method to achieve nonlinear damage detection. A series of the measured response data, downloaded from the web site of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) USA, from a three-storey building structure considering the environmental variety as well as different nonlinear damage cases, are analyzed and used to assess the performance of the new nonlinear damage detection method. The effectiveness and robustness of the new proposed method are finally analyzed and concluded.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.619-640
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• 2013

It is highly desirable to explore efficient algorithms for detecting structural damage of large size structural systems with limited input and output measurements. In this paper, a new structural damage detection algorithm based on substructure approach is proposed for large size structural systems with limited input and output measurements. Inter-connection effect between adjacent substructures is treated as 'additional unknown inputs' to substructures. Extended state vector of each substructure and its unknown excitations are estimated by sequential extended Kalman estimator and least-squares estimation, respectively. It is shown that the 'additional unknown inputs' can be estimated by the algorithm without the measurements on the substructure interface DOFs, which is superior to previous substructural identification approaches. Also, structural parameters and unknown excitation are estimated in a sequential manner, which simplifies the identification problem compared with other existing work. Structural damage can be detected from the degradation of the identified substructural element stiffness values. The performances of the proposed algorithm are demonstrated by several numerical examples and a lab experiment. Measurement noise effect is considered. Both the simulation results and experimental data validate that the proposed algorithm is viable for structural damage detection of large size structural systems with limited input and output measurements.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.57-80
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• 2015

Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) has been widely used for structural identification and damage detection. However, conventional EKF approaches require that external excitations are measured. Also, in the conventional EKF, unknown structural parameters are included as an augmented vector in forming the extended state vector. Hence the sizes of extended state vector and state equation are quite large, which suffers from not only large computational effort but also convergence problem for the identification of a large number of unknown parameters. Moreover, such approaches are not suitable for intelligent structural damage detection due to the limited computational power and storage capacities of smart sensors. In this paper, a two-stage and two-step algorithm is proposed for the identification of structural damage as well as unknown external excitations. In stage-one, structural state vector and unknown structural parameters are recursively estimated in a two-step Kalman estimator approach. Then, the unknown external excitations are estimated sequentially by least-squares estimation in stage-two. Therefore, the number of unknown variables to be estimated in each step is reduced and the identification of structural system and unknown excitation are conducted sequentially, which simplify the identification problem and reduces computational efforts significantly. Both numerical simulation examples and lab experimental tests are used to validate the proposed algorithm for the identification of structural damage as well as unknown excitations for structural health monitoring.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.35 no.6
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• pp.735-758
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• 2010

The paper proposes two methodologies for damage identification from measured natural frequencies of a contiguously damaged reinforced concrete beam, idealised with distributed damage model. The first method identifies damage from Iso-Eigen-Value-Change contours, plotted between pairs of different frequencies. The performance of the method is checked for a wide variation of damage positions and extents. The method is also extended to a discrete structure in the form of a five-storied shear building and the simplicity of the method is demonstrated. The second method is through smeared damage model, where the damage is assumed constant for different segments of the beam and the lengths and centres of these segments are the known inputs. First-order perturbation method is used to derive the relevant expressions. Both these methods are based on distributed damage models and have been checked with experimental program on simply supported reinforced concrete beams, subjected to different stages of symmetric and un-symmetric damages. The results of the experiments are encouraging and show that both the methods can be adopted together in a damage identification scenario.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.587-609
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• 2018

There is greater significance in identifying the incipient damages in structures at the time of their initiation as timely rectification of these minor incipient cracks can save huge maintenance cost. However, the change in the global dynamic characteristics of a structure due to these subtle damages are insignificant enough to detect using the majority of the current damage diagnostic techniques. Keeping this in view, we propose a hybrid damage diagnostic technique for detection of minor incipient damages in the structures. In the proposed automated hybrid algorithm, the raw dynamic signatures obtained from the structure are decomposed to uni-modal signals and the dynamic signature are reconstructed by identifying and combining only the uni-modal signals altered by the minor incipient damage. We use these reconstructed signals for damage diagnostics using ARMAX model. Numerical simulation studies are carried out to investigate and evaluate the proposed hybrid damage diagnostic algorithm and their capability in identifying minor/incipient damage with noisy measurements. Finally, experimental studies on a beam are also presented to compliment the numerical simulations in order to demonstrate the practical application of the proposed algorithm.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.82 no.6
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• pp.771-783
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• 2022

Structural damage identification (SDI) methods have been proposed to monitor the safety of structures. However, the traditional SDI methods using modal parameters, such as natural frequencies and mode shapes, are not sensitive enough to structural damage. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a new SDI method based on transmissibility assurance criterion (TAC) and weighted Schatten-p norm regularization. Firstly, the transmissibility function (TF) has been proved a useful damage index, which can effectively detect structural damage under unknown excitations. Inspired by the modal assurance criterion (MAC), TF and MAC are combined to construct a new damage index, so called as TAC, which is introduced into the objective function together with modal parameters. In addition, the weighted Schatten-p norm regularization method is adopted to improve the ill-posedness of the SDI inverse problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, some numerical simulations and experimental studies in laboratory are carried out. The results show that the proposed method has a high SDI accuracy, especially for weak damages of structures, it can precisely achieve damage locations and quantifications with a good robustness.