A new structural damage identification method

A new method is presented to provide an insight in to the characterizations of structural damages. The present algorithm makes use of an original finite element model and a subset of measured eigenvalues and eigenvectors. The proposed method detects damages in a decoupled fashion. First, a theory is developed to determine the number of damaged elements. With the damage number determined, the localization and quantification algorithms are then developed. A plane truss structure is analyzed as a numerical example to verify the present method. Results show that the method is accurate and robust in structural damage identification when the number of measured modes is more than the number of damaged elements with or without noise.