New damage-sensitive feature for structures with bolted joints

Abstract

Compared with riveted and welded joints, bolted joints have advantages of easily dismantled, high load carrying and load-transferring capacity. However, bolted joints are also weaker components of assembled structures. Structural damage detection (SDD) on bolted joints is much required in the field of structural health monitoring (SHM). A new SDD method is proposed for damage identification of structures with bolted joints based on residual error of AR model in time series analysis. Firstly, a new data standardization process is defined to maintain the information of damage location. Then, a new structural damage feature sensitive to structural damage is developed based on the standard deviation of AR model residual errors. To verify the proposed method, a bolted joint structure is designed and fabricated in laboratory, connection damages of structures are simulated by loosening the bolted joints. The acceleration responses of structures with bolted joints under healthy and damage cases are acquired. Finally, the SDD is performed by traditional DSF and the new DSF. The illustrated results show that the proposed method is a hybrid tool for the bolted joint damage detection with the new damage-sensitive feature. In addition, some related issues will be discussed as well.