A novel damage detection method based on flexibility identification theory and data fusion technique

An improved flexibility-based method hasbeen proposed in this studyfor damage detection, in which multi-scale convolution is utilized to decrease the interference of the measurementnoise and theDempster-Shafer evidence theory has been adopted to combine all scale information together to amplifythe damage characteristics. Threemain features make theproposed method distinguish with previous study:1)The proposed method is a kind of no-baseline flexibility-based method. Namely, this method can locate the damage with the absence of intact structural flexibility serving as baseline; 2) The flexibilityis estimated without requiring known the structural mass, which is a necessary in traditional method for flexibility estimation; 3) By utilizing multi-scale space theory and data fusion approach, the proposed methodhas a superior noise tolerant ability. Both numerical and experimental examples have been studied to reveal the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed methodindifferent noise level. The comparison between traditionalmethod and proposed method demonstrates that the latteris well suited to detect damage in beams structure in a noisy environment.