Structural health monitoring (SHM) is an important research area, which interest is the damage identification process. Different information about the state of the structure can be obtained in the process, among them, detection, localization and classification of damages are mainly studied in order to avoid unnecessary maintenance procedures in civilian and military structures in several applications. To carry out SHM in practice, two different approaches are used, the first is based on modelling which requires to build a very detailed model of the structure, while the second is by means of data-driven approaches which use information collected from the structure under different structural states and perform an analysis by means of data analysis . For the latter, statistical analysis and pattern recognition have demonstrated its effectiveness in the damage identification process because real information is obtained from the structure through sensors installed permanently to the observed object allowing a real-time monitoring. This chapter describes a damage detection and classification methodology, which makes use of a piezoelectric active system which works in several actuation phases and that is attached to the structure under evaluation, principal component analysis, and machine learning algorithms working as a pattern recognition methodology. In the chapter, the description of the developed approach and the results when it is tested in one aluminum plate are also included.
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