Signal Processing Techniques for Vibration-Based Health Monitoring of Smart Structures

Signal processing is the key component of any vibration-based structural health monitoring (SHM). The goal of signal processing is to extract subtle changes in the vibration signals in order to detect, locate and quantify the damage and its severity in the structure. This paper presents a state-of-the-art review of recent articles on signal processing techniques for vibration-based SHM. The focus is on civil structures including buildings and bridges. The paper also presents new signal processing techniques proposed in the past few years as potential candidates for future SHM research. The biggest challenge in realization of health monitoring of large real-life structures is automated detection of damage out of the huge amount of very noisy data collected from dozens of sensors on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. The new methodologies for on-line SHM should handle noisy data effectively, and be accurate, scalable, portable, and efficient computationally.