Robust structural damage detection and localization based on joint approximate diagonalization technique in frequency domain

The structural characteristic deflection shapes (CDS's) such as mode shapes and operational deflection shapes are highly sensitive to structural damage in beam-or plate-type structures. Nevertheless, they are vulnerable to measurement noise and could result in unacceptable identification errors. In order to increase the accuracy and noise robustness of damage identification based on CDS's using vibration responses of random excitation, joint approximate diagonalization (JAD) technique and gapped smoothing method (GSM) are combined to form a sensitive and robust damage index (DI), which can simultaneously detect the existence of damage and localize its position. In addition, it is possible to apply this approach to damage identification of structures under ambient excitation. First, JAD method which is an essential technique of blind source separation is investigated to simultaneously diagonalize a set of power spectral density matrices corresponding to frequencies near a certain natural frequency to estimate a joint unitary diagonalizer. The columns of this joint diagonalizer contain dominant CDS's. With the identified dominant CDS's around different natural frequencies, GSM is used to extract damage features and a robust damage identification index is then proposed. Numerical and experimental examples of beams with cracks are used to verify the validity and noise robustness of JAD based CDS estimation and the proposed DI. Furthermore, damage identification using dominant CDS's estimated by JAD method is demonstrated to be more accurate and noise robust than by the commonly used singular value decomposition method.