Damage Detection of Single Tapered Poles Using APSO Optimization Algorithm

In this paper, the damage detection of single tapered pole is studied. Structural damage has been identified using the vibration method. In this method, the APSO was used to detect the location and severity of the damage. The objective function for detecting damages, is a correlation coefficient based on natural frequencies. In order to accelerate the calculation of the natural frequencies of the structure, iterative method was used. In this paper, the damage is applied to the structure, by reduction of the stiffness matrix of the element in a finite element modeling and also in order to match the real situation, error in frequency is considered. To evaluate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed method in detecting damage of tapered poles, two numerical examples, including a police surveillance camera pole and a water storage pole under different damaged scenarios, are examined. In first and second example, structures are divided by 15 and 25 elements, respectively, with uniform moment of inertia. The results show that the proposed method is capable of detecting both location and severity of the damage properly, despite the complexity of some damage scenarios. Therefore, the algorithm can be used to detect the damage of other structures.