• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.63 no.4
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• pp.457-469
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• 2017

This manuscript deals with a novel approach aimed at identifying multiple damaged sites in structural components through finite frequency changes. Natural frequencies, meant as a privileged set of modal data, are adopted along with a numerical model of the system. The adoption of finite changes efficiently allows challenging characteristic problems encountered in damage detection techniques such as unexpected comparison of possible shifted modes and the significance of modal data changes very often affected by experimental/environmental noise. The new procedure extends MDLAC and exploits parallel computing on modern multicore processors. Smart filters, aimed at reducing the potential damaged sites, are implemented in order to reduce the computational effort. Several use cases are presented in order to illustrate the potentiality of the new damage detection procedure.