IDENTIFICATION ON SUDDEN DAMAGE OF BUILDING STRUCTURES BY USING CONTINUOUS WAVELET TRANSFORMS

The sudden change of structural stiffness such as weld fracture, column buckling, and brace breakage will cause a discontinuity in acceleration response time histories recorded in the vicinity of damage location at damage time instant. A damage detection approach based on continuous wavelet transform is developed and implemented in this study to detect the sudden damage event of a multi-story building structure. The Marr wavelet is utilized for examining the detection performance on sudden damage events. To examine the feasibility of the wavelet-based detection approach, parameter studies are carried out to investigate the detection quality for different external excitations and noise pollution.