Many methods have been developed and studied to detect damage through the change of dynamic response of a structure. Due to its capability to recognize pattern and to correlate non-linear and non-unique problem, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have received increasing attention for use in detecting damage in structures based on vibration modal parameters. Most successful works reported in the application of ANN for damage detection are limited to numerical examples and small controlled experimental examples only. This is because of the two main constraints for its practical application in detecting damage in real structures. They are: 1) the inevitable existence of uncertainties in vibration measurement data and finite element modeling of the structure, which may lead to erroneous prediction of structural conditions; and 2) enormous computational effort required to reliably train an ANN model when it involves structures with many degrees of freedom. Therefore, most applications of ANN in damage detection are limited to structure systems with a small number of degrees of freedom and quite significant damage levels.udIn this thesis, a probabilistic ANN model is proposed to include into consideration the uncertainties in finite element model and measured data. Rossenblueth’s point estimate method is used to reduce the calculations in training and testing the probabilistic ANN model. The accuracy of the probabilistic model is verified by Monte Carlo simulations. Using the probabilistic ANN model, the statistics of the stiffness parameters can be predicted which are used to calculate the probability of damage existence (PDE) in each structural member. The reliability and efficiency of this method is demonstrated using both numerical and experimental examples. In addition, a parametric study is carried out to investigate the sensitivity of the proposed method to different damage levels and to different uncertainty levels.udiiudAs an ANN model requires enormous computational effort in training the ANN model when the number of degrees of freedom is relatively large, a substructuring approach employing multi-stage ANN is proposed to tackle the problem. Through this method, a structure is divided to several substructures and each substructure is assessed seperately with independently trained ANN model for the substructure. Once the damaged substructures are identified, second-stage ANN models are trained for these substructures to identify the damage locations and severities of the structural element in the substructures. Both the numerical and experimental examples are used to demonstrate the probabilistic multi-stage ANN methods. It is found that this substructuring ANN approach greatly reduces the computational effort while increasing the damage detectability because fine element mesh can be used. It is also found that the probabilistic model gives better damage identification than the deterministic approach. A sensitivity analysis is also conducted to investigate the effect of substructure size, support condition and different uncertainty levels on the damage detectability of the proposed method. The results demonstrated that the detectibility level of the proposed method is independent of the structure type, but dependent on the boundary condition, substructure size and uncertainty level.
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