An improved damage diagnostic technique based on Singular Spectrum Analysis and time series models

Abstract

An approach to enhance the sensitivity of the damage index using the prediction errors of autoregressive – autoregressive exogenous models by augmenting Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) to detect and locate minor damage is presented. Numerical simulation studies are carried out by considering a simply supported beam with single and multiple cracks. An experimental study on a reinforced cement concrete beam has been carried out to validate the technique using different levels of damage. The studies emphasise that the SSA improves the sensitivity of the damage index for detection and also localisation, handling environmental/operational variability and measurement noise.

Keywords:

• Time series analysis
• autoregressive models
• Singular Spectrum Analysis
• damage diagnostics
• structural health monitoring

Acknowledgements

This paper is being published with the permission of the Director, CSIR-Structural Engineering Research Centre (SERC), Chennai.