Damage assessment of shear-type structures under varying mass effects

This paper presents an improved time series based damage detection approach with experimental verifications for detection, localization, and quantification of damage in shear-type structures under varying mass effects using output-only vibration data. The proposed method can be very effective for automated monitoring of buildings to develop proactive maintenance strategies. In this method, Auto-Regressive Moving Average models with eXogenous inputs (ARMAX) are built to represent the dynamic relationship of different sensor clusters. The damage features are extracted based on the relative difference of the ARMAX model coefficients to identify the existence, location and severity of damage of stiffness and mass separately. The results from a laboratory-scale shear type structure show that different damage scenarios are revealed successfully using the approach. At the end of this paper, the methodology limitations are also discussed, especially when simultaneous occurrence of mass and stiffness damage at multiple locations.