Damage detection in shear buildings using different estimated curvature

This study investigates the damage localization employing the curvature of the lateral displacement envelope in shear building structures. Both the finite difference method and the proposed interpolation method are applied to evaluate the curvature of mode shapes and frequency response functions (FRFs) in a 12-story shear building. The interpolated displacement function used in the proposed method considers appropriate continuity and boundary conditions for the shear buildings. Numerical studies show that using the curvature by the proposed method could reduce the occurrences of false damage localization when the vibration responses include small simulated noise. Moreover, the existing FRF curvature method could perform worse than random guessing to find correct damage locations at the cost of the considerable number of false alarms. However, the poor detection performance of the existing method may be enhanced significantly by using the proposed method to evaluate the curvature of the FRFs if the simulated noise is under a small level. The proposed method is shown to perform better than the finite difference method to improve the effectiveness of the curvature-based methods for damage detection.