Structural damage identification based on transmissibility assurance criterion and weighted Schatten-𝑝 regularization

Structural damage identification (SDI) methods have been proposed to monitor the safety of structures. However, the traditional SDI methods using modal parameters, such as natural frequencies and mode shapes, are not sensitive enough to structural damage. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a new SDI method based on transmissibility assurance criterion (TAC) and weighted Schatten-p norm regularization. Firstly, the transmissibility function (TF) has been proved a useful damage index, which can effectively detect structural damage under unknown excitations. Inspired by the modal assurance criterion (MAC), TF and MAC are combined to construct a new damage index, so called as TAC, which is introduced into the objective function together with modal parameters. In addition, the weighted Schatten-p norm regularization method is adopted to improve the ill-posedness of the SDI inverse problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, some numerical simulations and experimental studies in laboratory are carried out. The results show that the proposed method has a high SDI accuracy, especially for weak damages of structures, it can precisely achieve damage locations and quantifications with a good robustness.