Structural Damage Detection under Environmental and Operational Variability: An Exploration of Two New Vibration-based Schemes

The objective of structural health monitoring (SHM) is to ascertain if a structure is damaged or not based on measured data. Numerous approaches to detect damage have been put forth, such as those based on physical modelling or data-driven methodologies. The prerequisite for using data-driven methods is that damage is known to alter the dynamic properties, such as, stiffness, mass or energy dissipation of a structure which will directly alter the dynamic response. However, structures are in realistic scenarios subject to environmental and operational variabilities that potentially camouflage damage-induced changes in the dynamic response, hence leading to poor damage detectability. This thesis proposes two new vibration-based schemes which deals with the issues associated with environmental and operational variabilities. The result of this thesis exemplify the importance of considering the variabilities in a damage detection scheme in order to increase the structural reliability.