Online Identification System for Damage Location in Building Structures

An algorithm for real time damage location based only on acceleration signals is presented. The aim is to improvestructural health monitoring methods based on a wave propagation approach. This algorithm has the advantage thatavoids the storage and processing of data and thereby avoids delays in structural health assessment for buildingsstructures. In this article, damage in buildings is assumed as stiffness loss, that is directly reflected as changes in wavepropagation velocities and damping coefficients. These changes are detected using an identification system,characterized by its low computational cost, and robustness against measurement noise and constant disturbances.Subsequently, a detection threshold is designed by using changes between structural parameters identified before andafter induced damage. The experimental results of a five story reduce scale building confirm that the proposed method isa promising alternative for practical applications