Energy Index Method: Technique for Identification of Structural Damages

Abstract

A structural damage detection method based on the change of strain energy in each element before and after the occurrence of damage is presented. The proposed method can localize and quantify both single and multiple damages. The algorithm requires only the stiffness and mass matrices of the baseline structure and a few measured mode shapes of the current structure to find the location and severity of damage. The proposed method is applied to a benchmark problem sponsored by the IASC-ASCE Task Group on Structural Health Monitoring, which was developed in order to facilitate the comparison of various damage identification methods.