A new damage identification method based on structural flexibility disassembly

Abstract

This paper presented a new method for structural damage identification based on flexibility disassembly. The basic idea of the developed theory is to decompose a structural flexibility matrix into a matrix representation of the connectivity between degrees-of-freedom and a diagonal matrix containing the magnitude information. Using the flexibility disassembly, a new damage detection scheme is presented to approach the damage identification problem in three steps. The scheme has a unique advantage that it can accurately compute the stiffness perturbation parameter without any higher-order sensitivity analysis or iteration. The efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated by five numerical examples.