Experimental Study for Characteristics of Assessment of Neural Networks for Structural Damage Detection

When a structure is damaged, its dynamic responses (natural frequency, acceleration, strain) are found to be changed. The ANN(Artificial Neural Network) damage-assesment method is that some measured dynamic signals from the structural changing dynamic responses are applied to ANN to assess the structural damage. Although there have been some studies on a certain typical cases so far, it is rare to find studies about the characteristics of the ANN damage-assesment method or about its applicability, its strength and weakness. So this study researches on the characteristics of ANN damage assesment method and on a problem in application of the various dynamic responses to ANN. What the ANN damage assessment method usually does in past researches is to teach an ANN by using some response signals obtained from damaged structures under one kind of excitations and to identify the locations and the extents of damage of same structures under the same excitations. However, the excitations inflicted on the structures are not always the same. Thus this study experiments whether a ANN which is trained using the same excitations is able to identify the damage when different excitations inflict. All response signals are obtained from experimental models.