Application of short‐time matrix pencil method for high‐frequency damage detection in structural system

Abstract

Structural health monitoring (SHM) has been becoming a key element of monitoring and maintenance in modern and smart cities with critical infrastructures. Within the past decade, SHM approaches are widely used in bridges, roads, skyscrapers, critical facilities, and buildings to enhance the public safety and cost efficiencies of infrastructure maintenance under extreme events, such as earthquakes. Several advanced wave-based methods, such as sliding discrete Fourier transform, discrete wavelet transform (DWT), and Hilbert transform were broadly used to detect different failure modes of systems. One of the most important deficiencies associated with the state-of-the-art approaches is their high level of sensitivity to the sampling frequency, measurement noise, and damage-induced pulse parameters. To fill this technical gap, for the first time, this paper proposes a high-frequency damage detection approach based on the short-time matrix pencil method (STMPM) that has been used in electrical engineering lately. The advantage of STMPM compared with the similar approaches is using the complex frequencies that are not used before in damage detection applications. In this study, pounding between two adjacent buildings is considered as a case study of high-frequency damage scenario. The proposed STMPM-based detection technique is compared with DWT with commonly used mother wavelets. According to the simulation results, the STMPM-based detection is more robust compared with DWT-based techniques and has lower sensitivity to the noise parameters and sampling rate.