PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF STRUCTURAL DAMAGE DETECTION BASED ON FREQUENCY RESPONSE FUNCTION AND POWER SPECTRAL DENSITY

Abstract

Recent catastrophic events have aroused great interest in the scientific community regarding the evaluation and prediction of the structural response along the life cycle of infrastructures. Efforts are put into developing adequate health monitoring systems to help prevent future human life and economic losses. Here, two non-destructive damage detection methods are presented: the Frequency Response Function-based and the Spectral Density Function-based methods. The damage detection performance of both methods is compared through a particular case study, where different damage scenarios are analyzed in a 2D truss bridge. The reliability of each method is studied in terms of different prediction errors. Numerical results show that the PSD method for damage detection on a steel truss bridge structure provides more accurate and robust results when compared to that based on FRF.