Improved fault quantification for a plate structure

In this paper, an improved damage quantification methodology for a plate structure is presented. The methodology utilizes the relationship between the stiffness loss and the fractional changes of the modal parameters due to damage. To improve the damage quantification performance, the methodology is derived by eliminating erroneous assumptions in the existing modeshape-based methods and adopting additional modal information, i.e., natural frequencies. The basic elements of the approach are summarized in this paper, and the validity of the proposed method is demonstrated using numerical data from a simply-supported plate structure. In the numerical verification, the damage quantification performance of the proposed method is compared with the performance of other existing methods. Also, the effects of incomplete measurement and noisy modal test data on the accuracy of damage quantification are discussed. The result shows the proposed method yields superior damage quantification results to the existing algorithms.