THE USE OF TRANSMISSIBILITY FUNCTIONS FOR DAMAGE IDENTIFICATION IN REINFORCED CONCRETE BEAMS

Nowadays, structural health monitoring is the area of a great interest of continuing research aiming at establishing a reliable condition monitoring strategy of civil engineering infrastructure. Such finding will allow moving from the schedule-based inspection policy to condition-based policy. This study is dedicated to identify the damage in reinforced concrete beams by using only frequency domain vibration measurements. In the meantime, statistical pattern recognition model was tested through the course of this research. A transmissibility-based damage detection and classification system was proposed. Subsequently, the measure distance of the spectra envelope (COSH) was suggested as classification tool. The proposed method was examined on datasets from numerical beam model and experimental measurements from 2.0m reinforced concrete beam. For the two models, the results of the proposed approach proved effective and managed to detect various levels of defects, and classify the defects according to their size. Having processed response signals to detect and classify state conditions, the devised approach is relevant to use in embedded online structural health monitoring.