Vibration Anatomy and Damage Detection in Power Transmission Towers with Limited Sensors

This study presents a technique to identify the vibration characteristics in power transmission towers and to detect the potential structural damages. This method is based on the curvature of the mode shapes coupled with a continuous wavelet transform. The elaborated numerical method is based on signal processing of the output that resulted from ambient vibration. This technique benefits from a limited number of sensors, which makes it a cost-effective approach compared to others. The optimal spatial location for these sensors is obtained by the minimization of the non-diagonal entries in the modal assurance criterion (MAC) matrix. The Hilbert-Huang transform was also used to identify the dynamic anatomy of the structure. In order to simulate the realistic condition of the measured structural response in the field condition, a 10% noise is added to the response of the numerical model. Four damage scenarios were considered, and the potential damages were identified using wavelet transform on the difference of mode shapes curvature in the intact and damaged towers. Results show a promising accuracy considering the small number of applied sensors. This study proposes a low-cost and feasible technique for structural health monitoring.