Structural Damage Detection Using Static Test Data

Abstract

This paper presents a static-based method for damage identification in the simply supported beam structure using the incomplete measured static displacement parameters. The presented method makes use of the singular value decomposition of structural static displacement change, which is obtained by the static test of structure. It has been shown that structural damage can be detected by the number of the non-zero singular values of the static displacement change. The significant advantage of the proposed method is that it is economical in computation and is simple to implement. A simply supported beam structure is analyzed as a numerical example to verify the present method. Results show that the proposed method performs well even if the measurement errors inevitably make the damage assessment more difficult. It has been shown that the presented static-based methodology may be a promising tool to be used by research groups working on experimental damage detection.