Falk Hille

Subspace-based damage detection on steel frame structure under changing excitation

Damage detection can be performed by detecting changes in the modal parameters between a reference state and the current (possibly damaged) state of a structure from measured output-only vibration data. Alternatively, a subspace-based damage detection test has been proposed and applied successfully, where changes in the modal parameters are detected, but the estimation of the modal parameters themselves is avoided. Like this, the test can run in an automated way directly on the vibration measurements. However, it was assumed that the unmeasured ambient excitation properties during measurements of the structure in the reference and possibly damaged condition stay constant, which is hardly satisfied by any application. A new version of the test has been derived recently that is robust to such changes in the ambient excitation. In this paper, the robust test is recalled and its performance is evaluated both on numerical simulations and a real application, where a steel frame structure is artificially damaged in the lab.

Confidence Intervals of Modal Parameters during Progressive Damage Test

In Operational Modal Analysis, the modal parameters (natural frequencies, damping ratios and mode shapes) obtained from Stochastic Subspace Identification (SSI) of a structure, are afflicted with statistical uncertainty. For evaluating the quality of the obtained results it is essential to know the respective confidence intervals of these figures. In this paper we present algorithms that automatically compute the confidence intervals of modal parameters obtained from covarianceand data-driven SSI of a structure based on vibration measurements. They are applied to the monitoring of the modal parameters of a prestressed concrete highway bridge during a progressive damage test that was accomplished within the European research project IRIS. Results of the covariance- and data-driven SSI are compared.

Efficient Computation of Minmax Tests for Fault Isolation and Their Application to Structural Damage Localization

Fault detection and isolation can be handled by many different approaches. This paper builds upon a hypothesis test that checks whether the mean of a Gaussian random vector has become non-zero in the faulty state, based on a chi2 test. For fault isolation, it has to be decided which components in the parameter set of the Gaussian vector have changed, which is done by variants of the chi2 hypothesis test using the so-called sensitivity and minmax approaches. While only the sensitivity of the tested parameter component is taken into account in the sensitivity approach, the sensitivities of all parameters are used in the minmax approach, leading to better statistical properties at the expense of an increased computational burden. The computation of the respective test variable in the minmax test is cumbersome and may be ill-conditioned especially for large parameter sets, asking hence for a careful numerical evaluation. Furthermore, the fault isolation procedure requires the repetitive calculation of the test variable for each of the parameter components that are tested for a change, which may be a significant computational burden. In this paper, dealing with the minmax problem, we propose a new efficient computation for the test variables, which is based on a simultaneous QR decomposition for all parameters. Based on this scheme, we propose an efficient test computation for a large parameter set, leading to a decrease in the numerical complexity by one order of magnitude in the total number of parameters. Finally, we show how the minmax test is useful for structural damage localization, where an asymptotically Gaussian residual vector is computed from output-only vibration data of a mechanical or a civil structure.

Vibration-Based Monitoring of Civil Structures with Subspace-Based Damage Detection

Automatic vibration-based structural health monitoring has been recognized as a useful alternative or addition to visual inspections or local non-destructive testing performed manually. It is, in particular, suitable for mechanical and aeronautical structures as well as on civil structures, including cultural heritage sites. The main challenge is to provide a robust damage diagnosis from the recorded vibration measurements, for which statistical signal processing methods are required. In this chapter, a damage detection method is presented that compares vibration measurements from the current system to a reference state in a hypothesis test, where data-related uncertainties are taken into account. The computation of the test statistic on new measurements is straightforward and does not require a separate modal identification. The performance of the method is firstly shown on a steel frame structure in a laboratory experiment. Secondly, the application on real measurements on S101 Bridge is shown during a progressive damage test, where damage was successfully detected for different damage scenarios.

Stochastic Subspace-based Damage Detection with Uncertainty in the Reference Null Space

This paper deals with uncertainty considerations in damage diagnosis using the stochastic subspace-based damage detection technique. With this method, a model is estimated from data in a (healthy) reference state and confronted to measurement data from the possibly damaged state in a hypothesis test. Previously, only the uncertainty related to the measurement data was considered in this test, whereas the uncertainty in the estimation of the reference model has not been considered. We derive a new test framework, which takes into account both the uncertainties in the estimation of the reference model as well as the uncertainties related to the measurement data. Perturbation theory is applied to obtain the relevant covariances. In a numerical study the effect of the new computation is shown, when the reference model is estimated with different accuracies, and the performance of the hypothesis tests is evaluated for small damages. Using the derived covariance scheme increases the probability of detection when the reference model estimate is subject to high uncertainty, leading to a more reliable test.