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

Abstract

This paper presents a new vibration-based damage detection method for beam-like structures that uses the normalized uniform load surface (NULS) curvature obtained by modal flexibility. Analytical studies on the NULS curvature method for beam-like structures, which follow Bernoulli–Euler beam theory, have shown that changes in NULS curvature only occur at damaged elements and not at intact ones because the internal forces induced by damage only act on the damaged elements and not on the undamaged elements. Therefore, computing the changes in NULS curvature set indicating only damaged elements at a normalized level is central to the approach. Also, a damage index is proposed based on outlier analysis to account for measurement noise. In order to confirm the feasibility of the proposed method, a cantilever beam and a simply supported beam were numerically investigated for two damage scenarios by using modal parameters obtained by eigenvalue analysis and simulations of an impact test using MATLAB/Simulink. The results showed that the proposed method could accurately localize multiple damage locations as well as single damage locations without any false-positive or false-negative detections. For comparison, damage detection was also conducted using the uniform load surface (ULS) curvature method and the mode shape curvature method. The ULS curvature method clearly identified single damage locations but some missed multiple damage locations. For the mode shape curvature method, it was shown that the false-positive and false-negative detections were performed at several damaged or undamaged locations. The comparison showed that the proposed detection method can more effectively identify single and multiple damage locations than the other two methods. In conclusion, the proposed method performed better in detecting damages than the other two methods in terms of sensitivity to damage regardless of location and robustness against noisy signals generated from calculating the mode shape curvature.