Structural Damage Diagnosis-Oriented Impulse Response Function Estimation under Seismic Excitations.

Area of Science:

• Structural Engineering
• Vibration Analysis
• Damage Detection

Background:

• Impulse response functions (IRFs) are key for identifying structural damage by detecting changes in modal properties.
• Estimating IRFs under multiple excitations is complex due to underdetermined systems and ill-conditioned inverse problems.
• Existing methods are limited, particularly for scenarios involving multiple simultaneous excitations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a robust methodology for estimating IRFs under multiple excitations.
• To investigate the use of dimensionality reduction transformation matrices for IRF estimation.
• To validate the proposed approach for structural damage detection using seismic excitations.

Main Methods:

• Introduction of dimensionality reduction transformation matrices to relate sets of IRFs.
• Comparison of wavelet-based and Tikhonov regularization-based methods for IRF extraction.
• Numerical simulations on a truss structure subjected to seismic excitations.

Main Results:

• The proposed methodology successfully estimates IRFs under multiple excitations.
• Dimensionality reduction transformation matrices are shown to be effective.
• Both damage locations and severity were accurately identified in the numerical study.

Conclusions:

• The developed method enables accurate IRF estimation under multiple excitations.
• This advancement facilitates reliable structural damage detection in complex scenarios.
• The findings pave the way for practical applications in structural health monitoring.