Vibration-based localisation of structural deterioration in frame-like civil engineering structures

With the existing trend of minimising material use in typical frame-like civil engineering structures, such as buildings, bridges, and offshore platforms, these structures will typically be subjected to substantial wind induced vibrations. Besides being a source of disturbance for the occupants, these vibrations can potentially lead to an evident risk of structural deterioration. In order to ensure the safety of the structures, it is thus paramount that the potential structural deterioration can be identified before it becomes critical from a structural integrity point of view. One way of facilitating such identification is by use of structural health monitoring (SHM) techniques, which enable remote, typically through pre-installed sensors, diagnosing of the structural health. In the present paper, it is examined whether a vibration-based SHM approach proposed by the authors—and previously applied successfully to other structural systems, for instance, wind turbines—can provide reliable damage localisation in frame-like structures. The performance of the method, which is based on statistical interrogation of changes in a surrogate of the transfer matrix, is tested in a Monte Carlo setting with a numerical steel frame model subjected to white noise excitation.