An exact approach for structural damage assessment

Abstract

An exact approach is proposed for damage identification in statically determinate structures. The contribution of this study is twofold. Firstly, a rigorous disassembly formulation of structural global flexibility matrix is presented based on the matrix spectral decomposition, which can provide an exact relationship between the modifications of structural stiffness parameters and the associated flexibility matrix. Secondly, the static minimum-rank flexibility change is derived to obtain the exact flexibility change before and after damage. The proposed method is economical in computation and is simple to implement. For the statically determinate structures, the proposed method can exactly compute the elemental perturbed stiffness parameter only using a few of incomplete static displacement data. The efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated by two statically determinate structures. © 2013 Q. W. Yang.