Damage identification in a substructure of a box-section girder

Abstract

This paper proposes a substructural damage identification approach without the information of responses and forces at interface degrees-of-freedom. The proposed algorithm is based on a dynamic response reconstruction technique using the unit impulse response function in the wavelet domain. The relationship between two sets of time-domain response vectors from a target substructure is formulated. Only the finite element model of the intact target substructure and measured acceleration responses from the damaged substructure are required for the identification. Numerical studies on a three-dimensional box-section girder are conducted to investigate the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method of substructural damage identification. The simulated damage can be identified effectively even with 10% noise in the measured data.