Wavelet Decomposition-Based Approach for Fast Damage Detection of Civil Structures

Abstract

This paper presents a method, which can be implemented under limited resources such as wireless sensor network devices, for damage detection of civil structures. The detection method is applied to transient waves from vibration responses, and it consists of Haar wavelet decomposition, thresholding, quantization, and differentiating metric. Before the differentiating metric, a target signal is compressed into the wavelet coefficients “signature.” The results indicate that a single measurement channel without time synchronization of other measurement points is effective for instant damage detection through the case study using the ASCE structural health monitoring (SHM) benchmark program. It is also shown that we can reduce the data to a small fraction of the original data volume using this method, while retaining enough information to detect structural damage and its severity. The approach illustrated in this paper implies a promise of wavelet-based data compression and analysis for the increasing volume of SHM data.