Multimetric sensing for structural damage detection

Vibration-based damage detection methods have been widely studied for structural health monitoring of civil infrastructure. Acceleration measurements are frequently employed to extract the dynamic characteristics of the structure and locate damage because they can be obtained conveniently and possess relatively little noise. However, considering the fact that damage is a local phenomenon, the sole use of acceleration measurements that are intrinsically global structural responses limits damage detection capabilities. This paper investigates the possibility of using both global and local measurements to improve the accuracy and robustness of damage detection methods. A multimetric approach based on the damage locating vector method is proposed. Numerical simulations are conducted to verify the efficacy of the proposed approach.