An acceleration residual generation approach for structural damage identification

A residual generation approach using time-domain acceleration signals is presented for the detection of occurrence and location of damage in a structural system. An explicit damage indicator is also incorporated in the acceleration-based residual generators for the estimation of the severity of damage in individual elements. The formulation of the acceleration residual generators for damage detection extends from a previous work in the literature where displacements and velocities were considered. The basic idea of the damage residual generation is to transform the state–space description of a dynamic system with structural (stiffness) changes in different elements into multi-failure events. Consequently, the damage detection becomes effectively a disturbances decoupling problem (DDP) in control terminology, so that a geometric technique can be employed to design residual generators for individual components of the structure. By analyzing the residual error signal with an error model, the damage severity of a component can be established. Numerical and experimental examples are given to illustrate the implementation and the effectiveness of the approach.