Correlation-Based Damage Identification and Quantification Using Modal Kinetic Energy Change

Many existing damage identification or quantification methods can be employed only if the internal and external mass changes are negligible when tested at two different states of a structure. This paper presents a new Modal Kinetic Energy (MKE)-based method to detect and quantify damage using modal properties of structures, which can be employed even in situations when mass change is not more than a certain extent. A new damage sensitivity parameter has been developed using measured modal characteristics of baseline structure. The MKE change (MKEC) concept is then employed to locate damage and to estimate relative perturbation at each element. The relative damage extent vector is estimated by searching the best correlation between the analytical and experimental MKEC vectors with the help of genetic algorithm optimization tool. The extent of damage is calculated after computing damage scaling coefficient using measured eigenvalue change vector. A numerical study is carried out on a simply supported single span beam to confirm its performance under various test conditions. The robustness of the proposed MKE method and the significance of mass variation in the damage detection approach are evaluated by comparing the damage quantification results with a traditional approach. Finally, the proposed damage detection method is applied on a two-span simply supported beam for single and multiple damage scenarios by extracting the modal properties experimentally. The results revealed that the proposed approach is capable of detecting and estimating single and multiple damages with reasonable accuracy even in moderate noise contaminated and mass change environments.