A hybrid structural health monitoring technique for detection of subtle structural damage

There is greater significance in identifying the incipient damages in structures at the time of their initiation as timely rectification of these minor incipient cracks can save huge maintenance cost. However, the change in the global dynamic characteristics of a structure due to these subtle damages are insignificant enough to detect using the majority of the current damage diagnostic techniques. Keeping this in view, we propose a hybrid damage diagnostic technique for detection of minor incipient damages in the structures. In the proposed automated hybrid algorithm, the raw dynamic signatures obtained from the structure are decomposed to uni-modal signals and the dynamic signature are reconstructed by identifying and combining only the uni-modal signals altered by the minor incipient damage. We use these reconstructed signals for damage diagnostics using ARMAX model. Numerical simulation studies are carried out to investigate and evaluate the proposed hybrid damage diagnostic algorithm and their capability in identifying minor/incipient damage with noisy measurements. Finally, experimental studies on a beam are also presented to compliment the numerical simulations in order to demonstrate the practical application of the proposed algorithm.