An Evaluation of Damage Features Extraction from Attractors in Structural Health Monitoring

Structural health monitoring provides accurate information about structure’s safety and integrity. The vibration-based structural health monitoring involves extracting a feature which robustly quantifies damage induced change to the structure. Recent work has focused on damage features extracted from the state space attractor of the structural response. Some of these features involve prediction error and local variance ratio. In the present paper, a five degree of freedom spring damper system forced by a Lorenz excitation is used to evaluate these two typical damage features. Their ability of identification damage level and location is characterized and compared.