Damage detection in nonlinear civil structures using kernel principal component analysis

In the general framework of data-driven structural health monitoring, principal component analysis has been applied successfully in continuous monitoring of complex civil infrastructures. In the case of linear or polynomial relationship between monitored variables, principal component analysis allows generation of structured residuals from measurement outputs without a priori structural model. The principal component analysis has been widely used for system monitoring based on its ability to handle high-dimensional, noisy, and highly correlated data by projecting the data onto a lower dimensional subspace that contains most of the variance of the original data. However, for nonlinear systems, it could be easily demonstrated that linear principal component analysis is unable to disclose nonlinear relationships between variables. This has naturally motivated various developments of nonlinear principal component analysis to tackle damage diagnosis of complex structural systems, especially those characterized by a nonlinear behavior. In this article, a data-driven technique for damage detection in nonlinear structural systems is presented. The proposed method is based on kernel principal component analysis. Two case studies involving nonlinear cable structures are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. The validity of the kernel principal component analysis-based monitoring technique is shown in terms of the ability to damage detection. Robustness to environmental effects and disturbances are also studied.