Investigation of the performance of various modal correlation criteria in structural damage identification

Abstract

Structural damage identification is a scientific field that has attracted a lot of interest in the scientific community during the recent years. There have been many studies intending to find a reliable method to identify damage in structural elements both in location and extent. Most damage identification methods are based on the changes of dynamic characteristics and static responses, but the incompleteness of the test data is a great obstacle for both. In this paper, the performance of different modal correlation criteria in structural damage identification is investigated. The structural damage identification problem is treated as an optimization problem which is solved using the differential evolution search algorithm. The objective functions used in the optimization process are based on different modal correlation criteria, providing a measure of consistency and correlation between estimations of modal vectors. The performance of each of the objective functions is evaluated by a number of damage scenarios for a simply supported beam. Although the results of the various criteria on the different damage scenarios vary, it is clearly shown that some modal correlation criteria exhibit excellent performance in detecting the structural damage even in the case of strong incompleteness of the modal data.