Assessment of vibration-based damage indexes in structural health monitoring

As a key problem of the vibration-based damage detection, many damage indexes were developed in recent years, but a systematic and effective method to evaluate those damage indexes is not available till now. Therefore, a new assessment method by sensitivity from damage indexes to stiffness, adaptation to noise, ability of correct identification based on incomplete information and locality indicating locations of damage precisely is proposed in this paper to reflect various main problems in the damage detection and choose the proper damage index. The numerical example results show that conclusions drawn from proposed method as a foreordain way is consistent with common conclusions of previous study. The assessment method containing four indexes to qualify characteristic of indicators has bright prosperity in large structures for many important problems in practice are considered.