SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS AND IMPROVEMENT OF A PSEUDO-MODAL APPROACH FOR DAMAGE LOCALIZATION

Localization of damages becomes rather challenging when the associated stiffness reduction is small in presence of structural uncertainties. This work presents a sensitivity analysis and an improvement of a novel pseudo-modal approach, recently proposed by the authors. Starting from free vibrations of the undamaged and damaged states, the method aims to maximize the damage signature embedded in the data exploiting the peculiar features of the Orthogonal Empirical Mode Decomposition technique. The role of the length of the signals and the boundary effects are here investigated; a cut-off rule useful for reducing the latter issue is also proposed.