In the last ten years, monitoring the integrity of the civil infrastructure has been an active research topic, including in connected areas as automatic control. It is common practice to perform damage detection by detecting changes in the modal parameters between a reference state and the current (possibly damaged) state from measured vibration data. Subspace methods enjoy some popularity in structural engineering, where large model orders have to be considered. In the context of detecting changes in the structural properties and the modal parameters linked to them, a subspacebased fault detection residual has been recently proposed and applied successfully, where the estimation of the modal parameters in the possibly damaged state is avoided. However, most works assume that the unmeasured ambient excitation properties during measurements of the structure in the reference and possibly damaged condition stay constant, which is hardly satisfied by any application. This paper addresses the problem of robustness of such fault detection methods. It is explained why current algorithms from literature fail when the excitation covariance changes and how they can be modified. Then, an efficient and fast subspace-based damage detection test is derived that is robust to changes in the excitation covariance but also to numerical instabilities that can arise easily in the computations. Three numerical applications show the efficiency of the new approach to better detect and separate different levels of damage even using a relatively low sample length.

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Damage detection and localization in civil or mechanical structures is a subject of active development and research. A few vibration-based methods have been developed so far, requiring, for example, modal parameter estimates in the reference and damaged states of the investigated structure, and for localization

To cite this version:Michael Döhler, Falk Hille. Subspace-based damage detection on steel frame structure under changing excitation. AbstractDamage detection can be performed by detecting changes in the modal parameters between a reference state and the current (possibly damaged) state of a structure from measured output-only vibration data. Alternatively, a subspace-based damage detection test has been proposed and applied successfully, where changes in the modal parameters are detected, but the estimation of the modal parameters themselves is avoided. Like this, the test can run in an automated way directly on the vibration measurements. However, it was assumed that the unmeasured ambient excitation properties during measurements of the structure in the reference and possibly damaged condition stay constant, which is hardly satisfied by any application. A new version of the test has been derived recently that is robust to such changes in the ambient excitation. In this paper, the robust test is recalled and its performance is evaluated both on numerical simulations and a real application, where a steel frame structure is artificially damaged in the lab.

Automatic vibration-based structural health monitoring has been recognized as a useful alternative or addition to visual inspections or local non-destructive testing performed manually. It is, in particular, suitable for mechanical and aeronautical structures as well as on civil structures, including cultural heritage sites. The main challenge is to provide a robust damage diagnosis from the recorded vibration measurements, for which statistical signal processing methods are required. In this chapter, a damage detection method is presented that compares vibration measurements from the current system to a reference state in a hypothesis test, where datarelated uncertainties are taken into account. The computation of the test statistic on new measurements is straightforward and does not require a separate modal identification. The performance of the method is firstly shown on a steel frame structure in a laboratory experiment. Secondly, the application on real measurements on S101 Bridge is shown during a progressive damage test, where damage was successfully detected for different damage scenarios.