An inverse approach based on uniform load surface for damage detection in structures

In this paper, an inverse approach based on uniform load surface (ULS) is presented for structural damage localization and quantification. The ULS is excellent approximation for deformed configuration of a structure under distributed unit force applied on all degrees of freedom. The ULS make use of natural frequencies and mode shapes of structure and in mathematical point of view is a weighted average of mode shapes. An objective function presented to damage detection is discrepancy between the ULS of monitored structure and numerical model of structure. Solving this objective function to find minimum value yields damage's parameters detection. The teaching-learning based optimization algorithm has been employed to solve inverse problem. The efficiency of present damage detection method is demonstrated through three numerical examples. By comparison between proposed objective function and another objective function which make use of natural frequencies and mode shapes, it is revealed present objective function have faster convergence and is more sensitive to damage. The method has good robustness against measurement noise and could detect damage by using the first few mode shapes. The results indicate that the proposed method is reliable technique to damage detection in structures.