Damage detection of a thin plate using modal curvature via macrostrain measurement

Plate structures are employed as important structural components in many engineering applications. Hence, assessing the structural conditions of in-service plate structures is critical to monitoring global structural health. Modal curvature-based damage detection techniques have recently garnered considerable attention from the research community, and have become a promising vibration-based structural health monitoring solution. However, computing errors arise when calculating modal curvatures from lateral mode shapes, which result from unavoidable measurement errors in the mode shapes as identified from lateral vibration signals; this makes curvature-based algorithms that use a lateral measurement only theoretically feasible, but practically infeasible. Therefore, in this study, long-gauge fiber Bragg grating strain sensors are employed to obtain a modal curvature without a numerical differentiation procedure in order to circumvent the computing errors. Several damage indices based on modal curvatures that were developed to locate beam damage are employed. Both numerical and experimental studies are performed to validate the proposed approach. However, although previous studies have reported relative success with the application of these damage indices on a simple beam, only one damage index demonstrated the capability to locate damage when the stiffness of the local region changed near the sensor.