Structural damage detection using cross correlation functions of vibration response

Structural damage detection methods based on vibration responses are appealing for a variety of reasons such as their potential to observe damage from sensors placed remote from an unknown damage site. Of particular interest to the authors is online damage detection in which changes in the structure can be flagged up in an automated fashion by permanently installed transducers. In a previous paper by the authors, the inner product vector (IPV) was proposed as a damage detection algorithm which uses cross correlation functions between response measurements. Implicitly assumed in the formulation is that the response quantity is that of displacement resulting from white noise excitation. In this paper, the IPV technique is first reviewed and then generalised to address velocity and acceleration response to band pass white noise excitation. It is shown that the IPV is a weighted summation of the mode shapes, and the effect of some particular measurement noise on the IPV can be adaptively eliminated in the calculation of IPV. Then, the damage detection method based on changes in the IPV is proposed. Finally, damage detection experiments of shear frame structure, honeycomb sandwich composite beam and aircraft stiffened panel are presented to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.