Making Structural Condition Diagnostics Robust to Environmental Variability

Advances in sensor deployment and computational modeling have allowed significant strides to be made recently in the field of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). One widely used SHM technique is to perform a vibration analysis where a model of the structure’s pristine (undamaged) condition is compared with vibration response data collected from the physical structure. Discrepancies between model predictions and monitoring data can be interpreted as structural damage. Unfortunately, multiple sources of uncertainty must also be considered in the analysis, including environmental variability and unknown values for model parameters. Not accounting for uncertainty in the analysis can lead to false-positives or false-negatives in the assessment of the structural condition. To manage the aforementioned uncertainty, we propose a robust-SHM methodology that combines three technologies. A time series algorithm is trained using “baseline” data to predict the vibration response, compare predictions to actual measurements collected on a potentially damaged structure, and calculate a user-defined damage indicator. The second technology handles the uncertainty present in the problem. An analysis of robustness is performed to propagate this uncertainty through the time series algorithm and obtain the corresponding bounds of variation of the damage indicator. The uncertainty description and robustness analysis are both inspired by the theory of info-gap decision-making. Lastly, an appropriate “size” of the uncertainty space is determined through physical experiments performed in laboratory conditions. Our hypothesis is that examining how the uncertainty space changes in time might lead to superior diagnostics of structural damage as compared to only monitoring the damage indicator. This methodology is applied to a portal frame structure to assess if the strategy holds promise for robust SHM.