Detection of Structural Damage in Rotating Beams Using Modal Sensitivity Analysis and Sparse Regularization

Abstract

Rotating beams are often encountered in the wind turbines and the rotors, and detection of the damages in rotating beams as earlier as possible is central to ensuring the safety and serviceability of practical structures. To this end, a modal sensitivity approach in conjunction with the sparse regularization is proposed in this paper. First, the eigen equations for the flap-wise and chord-wise vibrations of a rotating beam are established upon Hamilton’s principle. Then, damage detection is formulated as a nonlinear least-squares problem that finds the damage coefficients to minimize the error between the measured and calculated data. To solve the nonlinear least-squares problem, the sensitivity method that requires the modal sensitivity analysis is developed. In real applications, damage detection is usually an ill-posed problem and to circumvent the ill-posedness, the sparse regularization is introduced due to the fact that the numbers of actual damage locations are often scarce. Numerical examples are studied and results show that the proposed approach is more accurate than the enhanced sensitivity approach and the flap-wise modal data outperforms the chord-wise modal data in damage detection of rotating beams.