Review on Structural damage diagnosis under varying environmental conditions—Part I: A linear

analysis - A.-M. Yan, G. Kerschen, P. De Boe, J.-C. Golinval

Paper presents a damage detection method for structural health monitoring under varying
environmental and operational conditions. In most of the previous analysis, vibration
characteristics of structures were estimated with the assumption of a constant environmental
condition. However, in practical situations, structures are often subject to changes in environmental
and operational conditions which will mask the changes caused by structural damages causing false-
positive or negative damage diagnosis may occur so that vibration-based health monitoring becomes
unreliable.

One of the methods used to solve this problem is to perform correlation between the measured
vibration characteristics and corresponding environmental conditions. However, this approach is
subject to several practical drawbacks. Another method proposed in which the environmental
variables are not measured and only the identified vibration features are analysed.

In this paper, an alternative approach to the second method is proposed, based on principle
component analysis (PCA). In this approach, the measurement of environmental variables is not
required, and the underlying physical quantities do not need to be known. Rather environmental
effects are treated as embedded variables. Changes in the measured features due to environmental
variations may be accounted for using PCA, and that they are different from those due to structural
damages. The prediction errors of the PCA model may serve as damage indicator. Novelty analysis is
adopted to decide whether the features indicate departure from normal condition or not.

PCA is a multi-variate statistical method, which is very useful for eliminating environmental effects
in damage detection. The proposed PCA based damage detection method is able to detect existing
damages independently of the environmental conditions at which the identification of the vibration
features is performed. No alarm should be issued if no damage occurs even when measurements are
performed under different environmental conditions.

Illustrating the proposed PCA based method in a simulated concrete bridge subject to temperature
gradient. As for linear case, the introduced damages are well detected. Whereas false or unclear
detection is possible for non-linear case. Fortunately, this drawback may be over-come or
alleviated by choosing a higher model order

Experimental wooden bridge model studied under different number of principle components; it is
observed that better results are obtained when more principal components are used. Small
variation of novelty indices is observed, which may be caused by the non-linearity and could not be
completely modelled by PCA, the damage detection with the present method is satisfactory

Advantages of this method is its simplicity and efficiency. It is not required to measure the
environmental parameters, which facilitates structural health monitoring and experimental data
shows that the different levels of damage may be well detected with environmental effects being
successfully eliminated. This method has also been applied to weekly non-linear cases by
increasing the number of PCA components. Extend of the preposed method can be applied to non-
linear cases too.

Assumption of linear behaviour has been made in this paper although it is well known that
completely linear cases are seldom in practical applications. Therefore, prudence should be kept
when vibration features are available only from limited environmental variations