Damage Detection of Structural Members by Prediction of Variation in Strain Energy

The number of transducers for measuring the structural behavior is far less than the number of degrees of freedom in the finite element model. It requires that the stiffness matrix must be reduced or the measured data may be expanded to estimate the data at unmeasured locations. This paper discusses the application of a model-based approach to detect the damage. Predicting all data to be expanded from the measured static or dynamic data, calculating the variation in static and dynamic strain energy, and comparing the numerical values of initial and damaged structures, this study provides an analytical method to detect the damaged location. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified in numerical applications.