As novel construction materials become more economically and technically available throughout theglobe, the structures become more complex. Therefore, an unexpected failure of these structures causescatastrophic economical and fatal losses. Over the past decades, a number of vibration based damagedetection techniques have been developed to avoid unexpected failure in structures. These damagedetection methods identify presence, location and magnitude of developed damage in the structureassociated to change of modal properties such as natural frequency, mode shape and modal damping.An essential limitation of these techniques is that they are majorly sensitive to high intensity of damageonly and do not correctly respond to minor to intermediate damage severities. This research proposeda novel damage detection methodology based on application of Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT) onthe acceleration response of the structure. HHT consists of Empirical Mode Decomposition followedby Hilbert Transform of the signal. The method develops a Damage Index Matrix for the structureby connecting energy index of the instrumented structural points. Viability of the proposed method isdemonstrated through numerical examples and laboratory experiments. The method was able to locateboth single and multiple damage scenarios in numerical models as well as laboratory experiment
As novel construction materials become more economically and technically available throughout theglobe, the structures become more complex. Therefore, an unexpected failure of these structures causescatastrophic economical and fatal losses. Over the past decades, a number of vibration based damagedetection techniques have been developed to avoid unexpected failure in structures. These damagedetection methods identify presence, location and magnitude of developed damage in the structureassociated to change of modal properties such as natural frequency, mode shape and modal damping.An essential limitation of these techniques is that they are majorly sensitive to high intensity of damageonly and do not correctly respond to minor to intermediate damage severities. This research proposeda novel damage detection methodology based on application of Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT) onthe acceleration response of the structure. HHT consists of Empirical Mode Decomposition followedby Hilbert Transform of the signal. The method develops a Damage Index Matrix for the structureby connecting energy index of the instrumented structural points. Viability of the proposed method isdemonstrated through numerical examples and laboratory experiments. The method was able to locateboth single and multiple damage scenarios in numerical models as well as laboratory experiment