A two-stage damage detection method for truss structures using a modal residual vector based indicator and differential evolution algorithm

A two-stage method for damage detection in truss systems is proposed. In the first stage, a modal residual vector based indicator (MRVBI) is introduced to locate the potentially damaged elements and reduce the damage variables of a truss structure. Then, in the second stage, a differential evolution (DE) based optimization method is implemented to find the actual site and extent of damage in the structure. In order to assess the efficiency of the proposed damage detection method, two numerical examples including a 2D-truss and 3D-truss are considered. Simulation results reveal the high performance of the method for accurately identifying the damage location and severity of trusses with considering the measurement noise.