Comparative Study of Mode Shapes Curvature and Damage Locating Vector Methods for Damage Detection of Structures

A number of damage detection techniques have been proposed to be applied for structural health monitoring systems. In this paper a comparative study of mode shape curvature and damage locating vector methods were considered for predicting damage of structures. The mode shape curvature method is based on the difference of mode shapes between damage and undamaged structures, while damage locating vector is based on difference of flexibility matrix of damage and undamaged structures. Three type of structures were considered in this paper. The first test structure is a shear building, the second is a beam-type, and the third is a plane truss system. For each type of structures a numerical model is carried out for simulations. Several damage scenarios were considered to evaluate both methods. From the numerical experiment, it can be shown that both methods in general have demonstrated a good sensitivity for damage detections. For shear building and beam structures both methods have the ability to predict the damage locations. Due to the nature of the methods, however, for plane truss structures, while the damage locating vector method can predict the damaged members, the mode shape curvature method can predict only the nodes in the vicinity of the damaged member of plane truss structures.