Open Access

ARTICLE

Fault Identification for Shear-Type Structures Using Low-Frequency Vibration Modes

Cuihong Li¹, Qiuwei Yang^2,3,*, Xi Peng^2,3

1 School of Civil Engineering, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing, 312000, China
2 School of Civil and Transportation Engineering, Ningbo University of Technology, Ningbo, 315211, China
3 Engineering Research Center of Industrial Construction in Civil Engineering of Zhejiang, Ningbo University of Technology, Ningbo, 315211, China

* Corresponding Author: Qiuwei Yang. Email:

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Failure Detection Algorithms, Methods and Models for Industrial Environments)

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2024, 138(3), 2769-2791. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmes.2023.030908

Received 02 May 2023; Accepted 31 July 2023; Issue published 15 December 2023

Abstract

Shear-type structures are common structural forms in industrial and civil buildings, such as concrete and steel frame structures. Fault diagnosis of shear-type structures is an important topic to ensure the normal use of structures. The main drawback of existing damage assessment methods is that they require accurate structural finite element models for damage assessment. However, for many shear-type structures, it is difficult to obtain accurate FEM. In order to avoid finite element modeling, a model-free method for diagnosing shear structure defects is developed in this paper. This method only needs to measure a few low-order vibration modes of the structure. The proposed defect diagnosis method is divided into two stages. In the first stage, the location of defects in the structure is determined based on the difference between the virtual displacements derived from the dynamic flexibility matrices before and after damage. In the second stage, damage severity is evaluated based on an improved frequency sensitivity equation. The main innovations of this method lie in two aspects. The first innovation is the development of a virtual displacement difference method for determining the location of damage in the shear structure. The second is to improve the existing frequency sensitivity equation to calculate the damage degree without constructing the finite element model. This method has been verified on a numerical example of a 22-story shear frame structure and an experimental example of a three-story steel shear structure. Based on numerical analysis and experimental data validation, it is shown that this method only needs to use the low-order modes of structural vibration to diagnose the defect location and damage degree, and does not require finite element modeling. The proposed method should be a very simple and practical defect diagnosis technique in engineering practice.

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