Vibration-Based Structural Damage Identification Under Interval Uncertainty

Identifying damages in mechanical structures in advance is essential part of preventing catastrophic losses. Among several non-destructive methods, the vibration-based method, which utilizes global characteristics of the structures, has several advantages such as not requiring prior information on possible damage location and physical access to it. In the meantime, the mechanical structures are inevitably subject to uncertainties, whose distribution is often unknown in practical situations due to such as limited amount of available data. Uncertainties are treated as interval uncertainty in such cases. In this regard, this study presents vibration-based damage identification under interval uncertainty. To obtain reliable result, this research does not assume any random distribution, e.g., uniform distribution, inside interval. Since detected damage is not assumed to be monotonic function with respect to interval uncertainty either, traditional fuzzy interval arithmetic is not applicable. Instead, we first carry out exhaustive search to see the effect of the interval uncertainty on the identified damage; i.e., discretizing interval uncertainty into sub-intervals and executing damage identification under all possible combinations to see the effect of the interval uncertainty on the identified damage. We then develop the unique algorithm based on M-H algorithm to facility computational efficiency.