On the use of the matching pursuit decomposition signal processing technique for structural health monitoring

In structural health monitoring, the fundamental goal is to address the problem of damage identification, localization and quantification. Using the wave based approach, the presence of damage is visualized in terms of the changes in the signature of the resultant wave that propagates through the structure. Since surface mounted piezoelectric transducers have been used for monitoring, the voltage output of each sensor is used for signature characterization. Due to the time-varying nature of these signals, performance of some existing analyzing tools may not be satisfactory. In the present study, the use of the matching pursuit decomposition has been investigated as a signal processing technique to compare signals from healthy and damaged structures.