Structural damage detection by integrating data fusion and probabilistic neural network

Over the past two decades, multi-sensor data fusion method has attracted increasing attention to structural health monitoring due to its inherent capabilities in extracting information from different sources and integrating them into a consistent, accurate and intelligible data set. Meanwhile, since the probabilistic neural network (PNN) describes measurement data in a Bayesian probabilistic approach, it has been successfully applied to structural damage detection (Jiang et al. 2004; Klenke et al. 1996; Ko et al. 1999; Ni et al. 2001). In order to make full use of multi-sensor data (or information) from multi-resource and to improve the diagnosis accuracy of the health conditions for complex structures, it is advisable to combine these methods and exploit their individual advantages. In this paper, a 5-phase complex structural damage detection method by integrating data fusion and PNN is developed and implemented. The proposed method is then applied to damage detection and identification of two simulation examples. The result shows that the proposed method is feasible and effective for damage identification.