Optimal controller design for structural damage detection

The virtual passive control technique has recently been applied to structural damage detection, where the virtual passive controller only uses the existing control devices, and no additional physical elements are attached to the tested structure. One important task is to design passive controllers that can enhance the sensitivity of the identified parameters, such as natural frequencies, to structural damage. This paper presents a novel study of an optimal controller design for structural damage detection. We apply not only passive controllers but also low-order and fixed-structure controllers, such as PID controllers. In the optimal control design, the performance of structural damage detection is based on the application of a neural network technique, which uses the pattern of the correlation between the natural frequency changes of the tested system and the damaged system.