A new signal reconstruction for damage detection on a simply supported beam subjected to a moving mass

A new signal reconstruction is proposed for damage detection on a simply supported beam using multiple measurements of displacement induced by a moving sprung mass. The new signal is constructed from the difference between the spatially integrated deflection for the intact (baseline) and damaged beams under quasi-static loading. To that end, it is shown that the static component of displacement from the dynamic moving mass experiment may be extracted very effectively using a robust smoothing technique and that this outperforms some comparable techniques. It is shown that by measuring displacement at a modest number of points on the beam the new reconstructed signal is able to detect the location of the damage more accurately than methods that use only a single-point data. In particular, the technique is able to detect damage present simultaneously at multiple locations and can do so with a highly variable moving mass velocity. In order to construct an a posteriori baseline, the strain data from the same traverse could be used to recover the displacement-time history of the intact beam, which could enhance the method by enabling the baseline to be determined from the same experiment, further eliminating effects of experimental conditions if required. However, a Monte Carlo simulation is run to consider the effect of signal noise, showing that the proposed damage detection strategy locates damage even in the presence of noise of 50% in the measured signals ( $${\text {SNR}} =7\, {\text {dB}}$$ ).