• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.1-15
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• 1997

This paper presents substructural identification methods for the assessment of local damages in complex and large structural systems. For this purpose, an auto-regressive and moving average with stochastic input (ARMAX) model is derived for a substructure to process the measurement data impaired by noises. Using the substructural methods, the number of unknown parameters for each identification can be significantly reduced, hence the convergence and accuracy of estimation can be improved. Secondly, the damage index is defined as the ratio of the current stiffness to the baseline value at each element for the damage assessment. The indirect estimation method was performed using the estimated results from the identification of the system matrices from the substructural identification. To demonstrate the proposed techniques, several simulation and experimental example analyses are carried out for structural models of a 2-span truss structure, a 3-span continuous beam model and 3-story building model. The results indicate that the present substructural identification method and damage estimation methods are effective and efficient for local damage estimation of complex structures.