Vibration test and health monitoring of membrane structure using non-contact laser excitation

In this paper, a vibration testing and health monitoring system based on an impulse response excited by laser-induced breakdown is proposed to detect damage on membrane structure. A health monitoring apparatus is developed with this vibration testing system and damage detecting algorithm which only requires the vibration mode shape of the damaged membrane. The vibration mode shapes of the membrane structure are analyzed by using 2-D continuous wavelet transform, and applying boundary treatment and the concept of iso-surface. The effectiveness of the present approach is verified by finite element analysis and experimental results, demonstrating the ability of the method to detect and identify the location of damages.