Use of damping identification technique for damage detection

Stiffness-based structural health monitoring methods are widely used for detecting the damage in a structure. These stiffness-based structural health monitoring methods uses change in natural frequencies and modeshapes for damage detection. These methods are based on identifying the change in stiffness of the healthy and damage structure to predict the damage in the structure. These stiffness-based methods are not efficient for detecting a small damage in a structure as there is a negligible change in natural frequencies and modeshapes due to a small damage in a structure, however the damping characteristics of the structure are highly sensitive to the damage in a structure. In this paper, new damping-based damage detection procedure has been proposed. In the proposed procedure, the changes in damping matrix of the structure has been used to detect the damage in the structure. The proposed procedure is able (or can) to detect both the location of the damage and the extend of the damage in the structure. The proposed procedure of damping-based damage detection is a 2-step procedure. In the first step, damping matrices of both the healthy and damage structure are identified and in the second step, the identified damping matrices are used for damage detection. Numerical and experimental case studies are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed procedure. The results have shown that the proposed damping-based damage detection procedure can be used for detecting damage in a structure with confidence