Merging Sensor Data from Multiple Temperature Scenarios for Vibration Monitoring of Civil Structures

The ambient temperature effect may result in limitations of vibration-based SHM approaches for civil engineering structures. This paper addresses the issue of discriminating changes in modal parameters due to damages and changes in modal parameters due to temperature effects. A nonparametric damage detection algorithm is proposed, which only assumes that several data sets are recorded on the safe structure at different and unknown temperatures, and smoothes out the temperature effect using an averaging operation.