• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
• /
• v.75 no.4
• /
• pp.415-424
• /
• 2020

Recently, many structural damage detection (SDD) methods have been proposed to monitor the safety of structures. As an important modal parameter, mode shape has been widely used in SDD, and the difference of vectors was adopted based on sensitivity analysis and mode shapes in the existing studies. However, amplitudes of mode shapes in different measured points are relative values. Therefore, the difference of mode shapes will be influenced by their amplitudes, and the SDD results may be inaccurate. Focus on this deficiency, a multi-strategy SDD method is proposed based on the included angle of vectors and sparse regularization in this study. Firstly, inspired by modal assurance criterion (MAC), a relationship between mode shapes and changes in damage coefficients is established based on the included angle of vectors. Then, frequencies are introduced for multi-strategy SDD by a weighted coefficient. Meanwhile, sparse regularization is applied to improve the ill-posedness of the SDD problem. As a result, a novel convex optimization problem is proposed for effective SDD. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, numerical simulations in a planar truss and experimental studies in a six-story aluminum alloy frame in laboratory are conducted. The identified results indicate that the proposed method can effectively reduce the influence of noises, and it has good ability in locating structural damages and quantifying damage degrees.

• Smart Structures and Systems
• /
• v.17 no.6
• /
• pp.957-980
• /
• 2016

Structural damage detection (SDD) is a challenging task in the field of structural health monitoring (SHM). As an exploring attempt to the SDD problem, a hybrid self-adaptive Firefly-Nelder-Mead (SA-FNM) algorithm is proposed for the SDD problem in this study. First of all, the basic principle of firefly algorithm (FA) is introduced. The Nelder-Mead (NM) algorithm is incorporated into FA for improving the local searching ability. A new strategy for exchanging the information in the firefly group is introduced into the SA-FNM for reducing the computation cost. A random walk strategy for the best firefly and a self-adaptive control strategy of three key parameters, such as light absorption, randomization parameter and critical distance, are proposed for preferably balancing the exploitation and exploration ability of the SA-FNM. The computing performance of the SA-FNM is evaluated and compared with the basic FA by three benchmark functions. Secondly, the SDD problem is mathematically converted into a constrained optimization problem, which is then hopefully solved by the SA-FNM algorithm. A multi-step method is proposed for finding the minimum fitness with a big probability. In order to assess the accuracy and the feasibility of the proposed method, a two-storey rigid frame structure without considering the finite element model (FEM) error and a steel beam with considering the model error are taken examples for numerical simulations. Finally, a series of experimental studies on damage detection of a steel beam with four damage patterns are performed in laboratory. The illustrated results show that the proposed method can accurately identify the structural damage. Some valuable conclusions are made and related issues are discussed as well.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
• /
• v.63 no.6
• /
• pp.825-835
• /
• 2017

Significant improvements to methodologies on structural damage detection (SDD) have emerged in recent years. However, many methods are related to inversion computation which is prone to be ill-posed or ill-conditioning, leading to low-computing efficiency or inaccurate results. To explore a more accurate solution with satisfactory efficiency, a PSO-INM algorithm, combining particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and an improved Nelder-Mead method (INM), is proposed to solve multi-sample objective function defined based on Bayesian inference in this study. The PSO-based algorithm, as a heuristic algorithm, is reliable to explore solution to SDD problem converted into a constrained optimization problem in mathematics. And the multi-sample objective function provides a stable pattern under different level of noise. Advantages of multi-sample objective function and its superior over traditional objective function are studied. Numerical simulation results of a two-storey frame structure show that the proposed method is sensitive to multi-damage cases. For further confirming accuracy of the proposed method, the ASCE 4-storey benchmark frame structure subjected to single and multiple damage cases is employed. Different kinds of modal identification methods are utilized to extract structural modal data from noise-contaminating acceleration responses. The illustrated results show that the proposed method is efficient to exact locations and extents of induced damages in structures.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
• /
• v.75 no.4
• /
• pp.477-485
• /
• 2020

Finite element (FE) model based structural damage detection (SDD) methods play vital roles in effectively locating and quantifying structural damages. Among these methods, structural model updating should be conducted before SDD to obtain benchmark models of real structures. However, the characteristics of updating parameters are not reasonably considered in existing studies. Inspired by the l_∞ norm regularization, a novel anti-sparse representation method is proposed for structural model updating in this study. Based on sensitivity analysis, both frequencies and mode shapes are used to define an objective function at first. Then, by adding l_∞ norm penalty, an optimization problem is established for structural model updating. As a result, the optimization problem can be solved by the fast iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm (FISTA). Moreover, comparative studies with classical regularization strategy, i.e. the l₂ norm regularization method, are conducted as well. To intuitively illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, a 2-DOF spring-mass model is taken as an example in numerical simulations. The updating results show that the proposed method has a good robustness to measurement noises. Finally, to further verify the applicability of the proposed method, a six-storey aluminum alloy frame is designed and fabricated in laboratory. The added mass on each storey is taken as updating parameter. The updating results provide a good agreement with the true values, which indicates that the proposed method can effectively update the model parameters with a high accuracy.