Damage Identification for Truss Structures Using Eigenvectors

This paper presents a two-stage structural damage identification method using the incomplete measured modal parameters. The first stage locates damages preliminary by using the generalized energy change of each structural element, which is defined as the inner product of the mode shape with the elemental stiffness connectivity vector. After the suspected damaged elements are determined in the first stage, the first order sensitivity of the structural eigenvector is used to identify damages more precise in the second stage. The significant advantage of the proposed method is that it is economical in computation and is simple to implement. A truss structure is analyzed as a numerical example to verify the present method. Results show that the proposed method performs well even if the measurement errors inevitably make the damage assessment more difficult. It has been shown that the presented methodology may be a promising tool to be used by research groups working on experimental damage localization.