Structural Damage Detection Using Auxiliary Particle Filtering Method

Structural damage identification is an important objective of health monitoring for civil infrastructures. Frequently, damage to a structure may be reflected by a change of some system parameters, such as a degradation of the stiffness. In this paper, an auxiliary particle filtering (APF) method is applied to track a dynamic system with sudden parameter changes. In the APF, the importance density is proposed as a mixture density that depends upon the past state and the most recent observations, and hence which has a good time-tracking ability that is more suitable for tracking the nonstationary system than the conventional particle filters. Simulation results for tracking the sudden parameter changes of nonlinear hysteretic structures are presented to demonstrate the application and effectiveness of the proposed technique in detecting the structural damages.