Structural damage detection in plates using wavelet transform

Detection of damage in engineering structures during their service life has received increasing attention from researchers in the last years. Exact structural damage detection is a challenging problem due to the nonlinear behavior of structures, incomplete sensed data and presence of noise in the data. Information on the location and extent of damages could assist in the diagnosis of the structural health conditions. In this study, a new method is proposed to detection of damage in plate structures using discrete wavelet transform. The wavelet transform was developed in the last years. The proposed method is applied to a four fixed supported rectangular plate containing damage with arbitrary length, depth and location. Numerical results of identifying the damage location are compared with the actual results to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.