New Features for Damage Detection and Their Temperature Stability

This chapter is devoted to present novel techniques in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). These techniques are based on different statistical and signal processing methods that are used in other fields but their performance and capability in SHM is presented and tested for the first time in this work. This work is dedicated to the first level of SHM, which might be considered the main and most important level. Piezoceramic (PZT) devices are chosen in this work to capture the signals due to their special characteristics such as high performance, low energy consumption and reasonable price. Suggested techniques are tested on different laboratory and real scale test benchmarks. Moreover, this work considers the effect of environmental changes on performance of the presented techniques. This work shows that although those techniques have a significant result in normal conditions, their performance can be affected by any environmental discrepancy such as temperature change. As such, there is a vital need to consider their effect. In this work, temperature change is chosen, as it is one of the main environmental fluctuation factors.