An Iterative Eigenvector Updating Method for Structural Damage Detection Using Piezoelectric Transducer Circuitry with Tunable Inductance

As one of the most common structural forms in port engineering, the operation environment of high-pile wharf is quite harsh and complex, and its pile foundation often produces structural damage of different degrees. Until now, there is a lack of efficient, safe and economic damage detection methods. A novel and precise real-time structural damage detection (SDD) method using both finite element modelling (FEM) and 1D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is established in this study. The results indicate that the proposed method could accurately identify the presence and location of damage in real time. The results also demonstrated that the proposed 1D CNNs based model are more sensitive to the longitudinal and lateral displacement responses of the high-pile wharf structure.

In this study, a two-stage damage detection procedure using a new approximation of modal strain energy (MSE) value is developed to boost the accuracy of structural damage localization in plate-type structures. The MSE is calculated using the center differential method for both intact and damaged states. The new formulas to approximate MSE are developed based on the nine-node isometric quadrilateral element that eliminates boundary conditions’ effect on damage detection results. The modal assurance criteria (MAC) is used as an indicator to choose the mode shapes with the best damage detection results. A global and a local MSE are proposed to enhance the accuracy of detecting the location of structural damage. An aluminum plate is used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed procedure with several damage scenarios. The results show that the new estimation of MSE value combined with MAC and the two-step MSE procedure can improve the accuracy of identifying the damage location compared to the original MSE procedure.KeywordsDamage detectionModal assurance criteriaModal strain energyPlate-type structureStructural health monitoring

The [Formula: see text] regularization is usually used to deal with the problems of under-determinacy and measurement noise for the conventional sensitivity-based model updating damage detection methods. However, the [Formula: see text] regularization technique often provides overly smooth solutions and thus cannot exhibit the sparsity of the structural damage due to the promotion of the 2-norm term on smoothness. In the study, a structural damage detection method is proposed based on an improved modal flexibility sensitivity function and an iterative reweighted [Formula: see text] (IR[Formula: see text] regularization. Specifically, the sensitivity function is established by introducing changes in the mode shapes into the derivative of eigenvalue and can be applied to identify the localized damage more accurately. Additionally, IR[Formula: see text] regularization is proposed to deal with the ill-posed problem of damage detection in a noisy environment. The proposed IR[Formula: see text] regularization is compared with the [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] regularizations through a numerical and an experimental examples. The numerical and experimental results indicate that the IR[Formula: see text] regularization can more accurately locate and quantify the single and multiple damages under the noise situation. The maximum identification errors are only 5.16% and 5.67%, respectively. Moreover, compared to the basic modal flexibility sensitivity function, the improved function is more sensitive to the damage. The maximum identification error of the improved function is less than 6%, while the relative errors are significantly larger in the basic function.

A damage detection process can be significantly enhanced if the nonlinear effects can be used when extracting damage-sensitive features from measured signals. The coherence function is typically used for nonlinearity identification by determining the extent of the output power linearly correlated with the input. However, the excitations are usually difficult to measure in actual tests. To overcome this limit, this article presents a signal-segments cross-coherence method for nonlinearity identification. By defining a signal-segments cross-coherence matrix and signal-segments cross-coherence index, the method can visually and quantitatively indicate the presence of nonlinearity. The innovation of the new method is that the coherence analysis process only depends on a single output signal, where input and baseline signals are not required. Then, a novel structural damage localization index is constructed by multi-point comparing of the signal-segments cross-coherence indices, based on the assumption that all the measured signals from different points on the structure have the same frequency bandwidth and components. To meet this requirement, a newly proposed signal decomposition method called analytic mode decomposition method is adopted. Numerical studies on a duffing oscillator and a 10 degree-of-freedom spring-damping-mass system were performed to demonstrate the nonlinear identification process and investigate the effectiveness and robustness of the signal-segments cross-coherence-based damage detection method. The results show that the signal-segments cross-coherence method can effectively indicate the appearance of nonlinearity by the signal-segments cross-coherence matrix and signal-segments cross-coherence index with strong noise robustness. And the proposed damage localization index can accurately detect the weak nonlinear damage even with severely noise-polluted signals. To further investigate the applicability of the new method, an experimental study was conducted on a steel simplified scale model of a monopile offshore wind turbine support structure. The results demonstrate that the proposed signal-segments cross-coherence method and the new damage localization index can be used to detect the bolt-loosening damage of the steel structure only with output signals.

In principal, a proper analysis of the dynamic response of a structure can provide general indicators of its operational conditions. When the dynamic response changes due to a variation of the physical properties of a structure, then one may conclude that some kind of damages has occurred. This paper presents investigation of the robustness and comparison of four simple methodologies to both identify and quantify the damages in structures, based on the use of Frequency Response Functions (FRF) signals, Principal Component Analysis technique (PCA) and Transmissibility. A steel beam with constant rectangular cross-section is used to compare the proposed approaches. At first, nine damaged scenarios are created and for each of them numerical examples are discussed; a database of FRFs is measured using modal testing. Then, PCA theory is applied to the FRF matrix and global damage detection and quantification indices are defined by using the first 3 Principal Components; Hotelling's T-squared distribution is also applied and by using transmissibility two other indicators, Transmissibility Damage Indicator and Weighted Damage Indicator, are computed for the assessment of damage. The reported examples show that all proposed methods are able to detect and quantify damages at the initial stage.

STOCHASTIC SUBSPACE-BASED STRUCTURAL IDENTIFICATION AND DAMAGE DETECTION AND LOCALISATION—APPLICATION TO THE Z24 BRIDGE BENCHMARK

Structural health monitoring (SHM) based on long-term safety and efficacy has attracted much attention. The success of SHM methods depends on the information content of the measurements; in addition, there are challenges in processing SHM in terms of the optimal number and location of sensors. In this study, we provide a convenient method for structural damage detection using vibration data from plane steel frames. We apply 1-D convolutional neural networks (1D-CNNs) to present an influential sensor selection analysis to maintain performance and optimize the number and location of sensors. Finding the damage location based on the optimal number and location of sensors will significantly reduce the detection time and the number of installed sensors. The proposed structural damage detection method uses stress analysis to find positions with large displacements, then divides the detection zones, selects highly discriminate sensors, analyzes the influence of sensor combinations within each zone to achieve optimization of sensor number as well as position selection, and establishes CNN models of the overall structure for damage detection of the joints. The proposed method was practically validated on benchmark data from the Qatar University Grandstand Simulator (QUGS). The experimental results show that the sensor demand rate is only 16.67% compared to the previous optimal number and location of sensors with no restrictions on the mounting position. Moreover, only four CNN models are required to predict damage/undamaged for the entire structure (30 connections). The accuracy of damage detection is improved to 96.62% using sensor combinations with influence.

Damage detection for beam-like structures using the normalized curvature of a uniform load surface

With the aim to decrease the uncertainties of structural damage detection, two fusion models are presented in this paper. The first one is a weighted and selective fusion method for combing the multi-damage detection methods based on the integration of artificial neural network, Shannon entropy and Dempster-Shafer (D-S) theory. The second one is a D-S based approach for combing the damage detection results from multi-sensors data sets. Numerical study on the Binzhou Yellow River Highway Bridge and an experimental of a 20-bay rigid truss structure were carried out to validate the uncertainties decreasing ability of the proposed methods for structural damage detection. The results show that both of the methods proposed are useful to decrease the uncertainties of damage detection results.

Application of two-stage evaluation and optimization update methods for the structural damage detection of a portal beam structure

Vibration-based damage detection for structural connections using incomplete modal data by Bayesian approach and model reduction technique

Effect of response type and excitation frequency range on the structural damage detection method using correlation functions of vibration responses

A structural damage detection method by integrating data fusion and random forests was proposed. The original acceleration signals were translated into energy features by wavelet packet decomposition. Then the processed energy features were fused into new energy features by data fusion. This can further enlarge the differences among all types of damages. Finally, random forests as an effective classifier was used to detect the multiclass damage. Numerical study on the benchmark model and an eight-storey steel shear frame structure model was carried out to validate the accuracy of the proposed damage detection method. The experiment results indicate that the damage detection method based on random forests and data fusion can improve damage detection accuracy in comparison with random forests alone, support vector machine alone, and support vector machine and data fusion techniques. Moreover, the proposed method has significantly better stability than several other methods.

Efficient damage detection technologies are highly demanded in the maintenance of bridge structures. For this purpose, the authors have developed the active Tap-scan damage detection method, which can extract bridge damage from the acceleration of a passing vehicle mounted with a shaker. Although this method can be efficiently implemented in a noisy environment with normal traffic, the damage detection accuracy could be deteriorated by the fluctuation of vehicle velocity, and the portability of the vehicle is impeded by the cumbersome shaker system. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a passive Tap-scan damage detection method, which uses an automatic driving vehicle with specially designed tire treads to scan the bridge. Instead of using the shaker, the tapping force is passively generated by coordinating the vehicle velocity with the periodic pattern of the tire tread. The theoretical basis of this method is firstly established on the analysis of the interaction between a simply supported beam and a passing vehicle with tapping contact forces, as well as the analytical solution of the deflection of a damaged beam subjected to a unit point force. Then, in-house experimental damage detection results of a simply supported aluminium box beam are reported to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Most of vision‐based methods for structural damage detection rely on supervised learning, requiring a substantial number of labeled images for model training, which is labor‐intensive and time‐consuming. To address these challenges, this study introduces a vision‐based structural anomaly detection and localization approach using unsupervised learning and reverse knowledge distillation. The proposed model incorporates a teacher model, a student model, and a trainable one‐class bottleneck embedding module. The asymmetrical architecture of the teacher and student models forms an encoder‐decoder structure for parameter transfer and feature extraction. The student network receives a specific embedding from the teacher network as input and target, facilitating the recovery of multiscale information from the teacher. Training images only contain the undamaged structures, and the teacher model, a pretrained model, instructs the student model to remember their undamaged features to detect and localize damages in unseen testing images. Through experiments, including a comparison among five candidate backbones for pretrained teacher models based on the residual network and testing across various structural damage types, the optimal model is identified, demonstrating good performance in both anomaly detection and localization. Furthermore, the model’s generalization performance is thoroughly validated, confirming its efficacy across diverse scenarios.