Damage Detection for Cantilever Beam Structures Using Two-stage Method

This paper presents a two-stage method for damage identification in cantilever beam structures using the incomplete measured static and dynamic paramenters. The first stage locates damages preliminary by using the static displacement changes, which is obtained by the static test of structure. It has been shown that the point from which the static displacement difference starts increasing linearly is the location of damage. After the suspected damaged elements are determined in the first stage, the first order sensitivity of the structural natural frequency is used to identify damages more precise in the second stage. The significant advantage of the proposed method is that it is economical in computation and is simple to implement. A cantilever beam structure is analyzed as a numerical example to verify the present method. Results show that the proposed method performs well even if the measurement errors inevitably make the damage assessment more difficult. It has been shown that the presented two-stage methodology may be a promising tool to be used by research groups working on experimental damage detection.