Structural Damage Identification Based on Sensitivity Analysis and Sparse Constraint

Abstract

Abstract In the problem of structural damage identification, only a few elements or substructures are damaged, which means the damage of the structure has sparsity. Hence, this paper proposed a structural damage identification method based on sensitivity analysis and sparse constraint. This method established the sensitivity equations through the first-order sensitivity analysis of the structure. Then a damaged elements compression method was used to reduce the number of damaged elements. And the original problem was transformed into a constrained optimization problem with the L1 norm of damage coefficients as the objective function to describe the sparsity. Finally, the results of a numerical example showed that the method can effectively identify single-damage and multi-damage conditions with great robustness.