A structural health monitoring system based on multifractal detrended cross-correlation analysis

In recent years, multifractal-based analysis methods have been widely applied in engineering. Among these methods, multifractal detrended cross-correlation analysis (MFDXA), a branch of fractal analysis, has been successfully applied in the fields of finance and biomedicine. For its great potential in reflecting the subtle characteristic among signals, a structural health monitoring (SHM) system based on MFDXA is proposed. In this system, damage assessment is conducted by exploiting the concept of multifractal theory to quantify the complexity of the vibration signal measured from a structure. According to the proposed algorithm, the damage condition is first distinguished by multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis. Subsequently, the relationship between the q-order, q-order detrended covariance, and length of segment is further explored. The dissimilarity between damaged and undamaged cases is visualized on contour diagrams, and the damage location can thus be detected using signals measured from different floors. Moreover, a damage index is proposed to efficiently enhance the SHM process. A seven-story benchmark structure, located at the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE), was employed for an experimental verification to demonstrate the performance of the proposed SHM algorithm. According to the results, the damage condition and orientation could be correctly identified using the MFDXA algorithm and the proposed damage index. Since only the ambient vibration signal is required along with a set of initial reference measurements, the proposed SHM system can provide a lower cost, efficient, and reliable monitoring process.