Damage localization in damaged civil structures

What is it about?

Finding the location of the damage is an important issue in civil engineering and structural health monitoring. In this research, the authors proposed an effective but simple approach to locating damage in difficult conditions such as with non-stationary signal and unknown (unmeasurable) ambient vibration.

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Why is it important?

In the civil engineering community, when an expensive and important structure suffered from damage, it is imperative to find the damage location for the maintenance and rehabilitation procedures. However, it is not always easy to locate damage via non-stationary vibration signals acquired from unknown (unmeasurable) ambient excitations. Moreover, the use of complex and maybe time-consuming technique may not be useful and applicable. This research study proposed a simple but effective energy-based method via signal decomposition and a statistical distance measure (Mahalanobis) to locate the single and multiple damage locations.