• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.221-237
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• 2015

An integrated method is proposed for structural nonlinear damage detection based on time series analysis and the higher statistical moments of structural responses in this study. It combines the time series analysis, the higher statistical moments of AR model residual errors and the fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering techniques. A few comprehensive damage indexes are developed in the arithmetic and geometric mean of the higher statistical moments, and are classified by using the FCM clustering method to achieve nonlinear damage detection. A series of the measured response data, downloaded from the web site of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) USA, from a three-storey building structure considering the environmental variety as well as different nonlinear damage cases, are analyzed and used to assess the performance of the new nonlinear damage detection method. The effectiveness and robustness of the new proposed method are finally analyzed and concluded.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.23-33
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• 2020

Majority of the damage in engineering structures is nonlinear. Damage sensitive features (DSFs) extracted by traditional methods from linear time series models cannot effectively handle nonlinearity induced by structural damage. A new DSF is proposed based on vector space cosine similarity (VSCS), which combines K-means cluster analysis and Bayesian discrimination to detect nonlinear structural damage. A reference autoregressive moving average (ARMA) model is built based on measured acceleration data. This study first considers an existing DSF, residual standard deviation (RSD). The DSF is further advanced using the VSCS, and then the advanced VSCS is classified using K-means cluster analysis and Bayes discriminant analysis, respectively. The performance of the proposed approach is then verified using experimental data from a three-story shear building structure, and compared with the results of existing RSD. It is demonstrated that combining the linear ARMA model and the advanced VSCS, with cluster analysis and Bayes discriminant analysis, respectively, is an effective approach for detection of nonlinear damage. This approach improves the reliability and accuracy of the nonlinear damage detection using the linear model and significantly reduces the computational cost. The results indicate that the proposed approach is potential to be a promising damage detection technique.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.49 no.3
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• pp.411-425
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• 2014

This paper presents the processing of nonlinear features associated with a damage event by quadratic time-frequency distributions for damage identification in a frame structure. A time-frequency distribution is a function which distributes the total energy of a signal at a particular time and frequency point. As the occurrence of damage often gives rise to non-stationary, nonlinear structural behavior, simultaneous representation of the dynamic response in the time-frequency plane offers valuable insight for damage detection. The applicability of the bilinear time-frequency distributions of the Cohen class is examined for the damage assessment of a frame structure from the simulated acceleration data. It is shown that the changes in instantaneous energy of the dynamic response could be a good damage indicator. Presence and location of damage can be identified using Choi-Williams distribution when damping is ignored. However, in the presence of damping the Page distribution is more effective and offers better readability for structural damage detection.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.711-725
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• 2018

Most of the practical engineering structures exhibit nonlinearity due to nonlinear dynamic characteristics of structural joints, nonlinear boundary conditions and nonlinear material properties. Hence, it is highly desirable to detect and characterize the nonlinearity present in the system in order to assess the true behaviour of the structural system. Further, these identified nonlinear features can be effectively used for damage diagnosis during structural health monitoring. In this paper, we focus on the detection of the nonlinearity present in the system by confining our discussion to only a few selective time-frequency analysis and multivariate analysis based techniques. Both damage induced nonlinearity and inherent structural nonlinearity in healthy systems are considered. The strengths and weakness of various techniques for nonlinear detection are investigated through numerically simulated two different classes of nonlinear problems. These numerical results are complemented with the experimental data to demonstrate its suitability to the practical problems.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.13-27
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• 2023

Fatigue crack is a fatal problem for steel structures. Early detection and maintenance can help extend the service life and prevent hazards. This paper presents the ultrasonic guided waves-based (UGWs-based) fatigue crack detection of a steel I-beam. The semi-analytical finite element model has been built to obtain the wave propagation characteristics. Damage indices in both time and frequency domains were analyzed by considering the characteristic variations of UGWs including the amplitude, phase angle, and wave packet energy. The pulse-echo and pitch-catch methods were combined in the detection scheme. Lab-scale experiments were conducted on welded steel I-beams to verify the proposed method. Results show that the damage indices based on the characteristic variations in the time domain can identify and localize the fatigue crack before it enters the rapid growth stage. The damage severity can be reasonably evaluated by analyzing the time-domain damage indices. Two nonlinear damage indices in the frequency domain give earlier warnings of the fatigue crack than the time-domain damage indices do. The identification results based on the above two nonlinear indices are found to be less consistent under various excitation frequencies. More robust nonlinear techniques needed to be searched and tested for early crack detection in steel I-beams in further study.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.179-200
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• 2022

This paper proposes a data-driven methodology for online early damage identification under changing environmental conditions. The proposed method relies on two data analysis methods: feature-based method and hybrid principal component analysis (PCA) and kernel PCA to separate damage from environmental influences. First, spectral sub-band features, namely, spectral sub-band centroids (SSCs) and log spectral sub-band energies (LSSEs), are proposed as damage-sensitive features to extract damage information from measured structural responses. Second, hybrid modeling by integrating PCA and kernel PCA is performed on the spectral sub-band feature matrix for data normalization to extract both linear and nonlinear features for nonlinear procedure monitoring. After feature normalization, suppressing environmental effects, the control charts (Hotelling T² and SPE statistics) is implemented to novelty detection and distinguish damage in structures. The hybrid PCA-KPCA technique is compared to KPCA by applying support vector machine (SVM) to evaluate the effectiveness of its performance in detecting damage. The proposed method is verified through numerical and full-scale studies (a Bridge Health Monitoring (BHM) Benchmark Problem and a cable-stayed bridge in China). The results demonstrate that the proposed method can detect the structural damage accurately and reduce false alarms by suppressing the effects and interference of environmental variations.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.31-38
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• 2003

In the present work, a nonlinear inverse perturbation method which has been used in the structural optimization, is adopted so as to identify the structural damages. Unlike the structural optimization, a larger number of constrained equations than the number of unknown parameters are often required detect structural damage. Therefore, nonlinear least squares method is utilized to solve the problem. Because only a limited number of sensors are available I real situation of damage detection, the determination of sensor location becomes one of the most important issues. Hence, this work concentrates on the issue of sensor placement in the framework of nonlinear inverse perturbation method, and the performances of various methodologies concerning to sensor placement are compared with each other. The comparisons show tat the successive elimination method gets good performance for sensor placement. From the several numerical studies, it is confirmed that the inverse perturbation method, combined with the successive elimination method, is very promising in structural damage detection.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.40 no.6
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• pp.745-762
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• 2011

Damage detection methodologies based on the direct examination of the nonlinear-nonstationary characteristics of the structure dynamic response may play an important role in online structural health monitoring applications. Different signal processing based damage detection methodologies have been proposed based on the uncovering of spikes in the high frequency component of the structural response obtained via Discrete Wavelet transforms, Hilbert-Huang transforms or high pass filtering. The performance of these approaches in systems subjected to different types of excitation is evaluated in this paper. It is found that in the case of random excitations, like earthquake accelerations, the effectiveness of such methodologies is limited. An alternative damage detection approach using the Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) is also evaluated to overcome this limitation. Using the CWT has the advantage that the central frequencies at which it operates can be defined by the user while the frequency bands of the detail functions obtained via DWT are predetermined by the sampling period of the signal.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.1-6
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• 2013

Ultrasonic guided wave techniques have been widely used for long range nondestructive detection in tube-like structures. The present paper investigates the ultrasonic linear and nonlinear parameters for evaluating the thermal damage in aluminum pipe. Specimens were subjected to thermal loading. Flexible polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) comb transducers were used to generate and receive the ultrasonic waves. The second harmonic wave generation technique was used to check the material nonlinearity change after different heat loadings. The conventional linear ultrasonic approach based on attenuation was also used to evaluate the thermal damages in specimens. The results show that the proposed experimental setup is viable to assess the thermal damage in an aluminum pipe. The ultrasonic nonlinear parameter is a promising candidate for the prediction of micro-damages in a tube-like structure.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2011.04a
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• pp.278-281
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• 2011

The global coordinates generated from Isomap algorithm provide a simple way to analyze and manipulate high dimensional observations in terms of their intrinsic nonlinear degrees of freedom. Thus, Isomap can find globally meaningful coordinates and nonlinear structure of complex data sets, while neither principal component analysis (PCA) nor multidimensional scaling (MDS) are successful in many cases. It is demonstrated that the adapted Isomap algorithm successfully enhances the quality of pattern classification for damage identification in various numerical examples.