On-line Health Monitoring and Damage Detection of Structures Based on the Wavelet Transform

Presented herein is an experiment that aims to investigate the applicability of the wavelet transform to damage detection of a beam–spring structure. By burning out the string that is connected to the cantilever beam, high-frequency oscillations are excited in the beam–spring system, and there results an abrupt change or impulse in the discrete-wavelet-transformed signal. In this way, the discrete wavelet transform can be used to recognize the damage at the moment it occurs. In the second stage of damage detection, the shift of frequencies and damping ratios is identified by the continuous wavelet transform so as to ensure that the abrupt change or impulse in the signal from the discrete wavelet transform is a result of the damage and not the noise. For the random forced vibration, the random decrement technique is used on the original signal to obtain the free decaying responses, and then the continuous wavelet transform is applied to identify the system parameters. Some developed p version elements are used for the parametric studies on the first stage of health monitoring and to find the damage location. The results show that the two-stage method is successful in damage detection. Since the method is simple and computationally efficient, it is a good candidate for on-line health monitoring and damage detection of structures.