Damage identification research of elastic plate by means of DLV based approach

The damage locating vector (DLV) method proposed by Bernal in 2002 has received significant attention in structural damage identification field due to its innovative and skillful solution concept. This research is focused on the performance of DLV method that creates stress fields that bypass the damaged region in the case of a plate-like structure that are characterized by two dimensional curvature. A rectangular plate simply supported along its two edges is adopted to analyze with finite element method and the damage visualization program of DLV is developed. Four damage cases are considered: a) damage in one element near support; b) damage in one element far away from support; c) damage in two adjoining elements; d) damage in two non-adjoining elements. Numerical simulation study demonstrates that the method is effective in diagnosing damage location when damage happened in one element or in two adjoining elements, however not very effective when damage happened in two non-adjoining elements. Future efforts to use dynamic damage locating vector method to identify damage of plate-like structures.