Wavelet entropy based structural damage identification under seismic excitation

Abstract

In this work, an entropy based two-step structural damage identification method under seismic excitation is proposed. The measured signals are decomposed by means of wavelet packet transform, and the wavelet entropies are obtained on the basis of the information entropy theory. In the first step, the damage alarming indices, calculated with the wavelet entropies in undamaged and damaged conditions, are used as samples for Shewhart individuals control chart to alarm the structural damage. In the second step, the damage localization indices, constructed by calculating the differences of curvature of wavelet entropies in undamaged and damaged conditions, are fed to the back-propagation neural network to identify structure damage location. The numerical simulation and shaking table model test of an offshore platform under seismic excitation are implemented to verify the feasibility of the proposed two-step structural damage identification method. The results show that the proposed method needs only the non-stationary output data and has low sensitivity to signal noise.