Enhancements to the damage locating vector method for structural health monitoring

Abstract

This study adapts and extends the damage locating vector (DLV) method in four major directions for detection of damage in structures. Firstly, to account for the different element types and variations of internal forces and capacities along the length of each element, the normalized cumulative energy criterion is proposed. Secondly, to filter out the actual damaged elements from a larger set of potential damaged elements resulting from noise and limited number of sensors employed, two schemes are introduced. One is suitable for the case where the number of sensors is relative large compared to the structural degrees of freedom (DOF) while the other is efficient for the case where limited number of sensors are available. Thirdly, recognizing the importance of the quality of measured signals on the reliability of the damage detection results, an algorithm is devised to sieve out b poor qualityb signals. Fourthly, since wireless sensors will become popular in structural health monitor