Early damage detection of structure’s joints is essential in order to ensure the integrity of structures. Vibration-based methods are the most popular way of diagnosing damage in machinery joints. Any technique that is used for such a purpose requires dealing with the variability inherent to the system due to manufacturing tolerances, environmental conditions or aging. The level of variability in vibrational response can be very high for mass-produced complex structures that possess a large number of components. In this study, a simple and efficient time frequency method is proposed for detection of damage in connecting joints. The method suggests using singular spectrum analysis for building a reference space from the signals measured on a healthy structure and then compares all other signals to that reference space in order to detect the presence of faults. A model of two plates connected by a series of mounts is used to examine the effectiveness of the method where the uncertainty in the mount properties is taken into account to model the variability in the built-up structure. The motivation behind the simplified model is to identify the faulty mounts in trim-structure joints of an automotive vehicle where a large number of simple plastic clips are used to connect the trims to the vehicle structure.
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