Structural health monitoring at Los Alamos National Laboratory

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has several ongoing programs to identify damage in structures and mechanical systems from changes in their dynamic characteristics. This paper provides a summary of LANL´s involvement with this technology, past experiences in this field including damage detection studies on large civil engineering infrastructure and the directions that research in this area will be taking in the future. The research began by taking a strictly model-based approach to the vibration-based damage detection problem. Recent work has recognized that it is more appropriate to view the damage detection problem as an exercise in statistical pattern recognition. Therefore, a general statistical pattern recognition paradigm will be proposed