Statistical Damage Assessment of Framed Structures from Static Responses

This paper presents a damage assessment algorithm for framed structures based on a system identification scheme with a regularization technique. The regularization technique is introduced to alleviate the ill-posedness of the system identification problems. A new regularization function based on the Frobenius norm of the difference between the estimated and the baseline stiffness matrix is proposed. A parameter grouping technique is adopted to locate damaged members and to overcome sparseness of measured data. A data perturbation method is employed to obtain statistical distributions of system parameters with a set of noise-polluted measured data. A statistical approach by a hypothesis test is presented to assess damage. The validity of the proposed method is demonstrated through numerical examples.