Weighted Transmissibility Assurance Criterion for Structural Damage Detection

Abstract

Transmissibility function (TF) is a useful damage indicator for effective structural damage detection (SDD) under unknown external excitations. However, TF is not sensitive enough to structural damage under measurement noise. To improve the sensitivity of this indicator, a common model reduction technique, that is, the system equivalent reduction expansion process (SEREP) was first adopted to obtain reduced element stiffness matrices in the initial analytical finite-element model of a structure; this was used to weight the TFs in this study. Then, inspired by the cosine similarity measure, a novel damage indicator, called the weighted transmissibility assurance criterion (WTAC), was proposed for evaluating structural states. The effectiveness of the proposed damage indicator, WTAC, was first studied by a six-story frame in numerical simulations. The results showed that the TF weighted by the reduced element stiffness matrices improved the signal-to-noise ratio of the TF, and the proposed WTAC detected changes in structural states under noise. Moreover, further experimental studies on an aluminum alloy frame were conducted in order to assess the proposed WTAC. The results indicated that the proposed WTAC may provide a potential tool for effective SDD with strong robustness and stability for long-term monitoring on site.