Multi-damage identification of large-scale truss structures using a two-step approach

In this paper, a two-step damage detection approach is presented to identify the location and severity of multiple damage cases in large-scale truss structures. In the first step, a damage locating vector (DLV) method based on EDS (exponential decreased stress) considering modal flexibility differences is employed to localize the damaged elements of a structure. Next, a crow search algorithm (CSA) is applied to estimate the severity of reported damaged elements using the results of the first step. Numerical examples including three large-scale trusses are considered to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed approach. In order to assess the effect of noise on the process of damage detection, a statistical study on each example is investigated, and selection of an appropriate threshold is studied in this article. The results indicate that the combination of the DLV method using EDS and CSA can reliably determine the location and severity of multiple structural damage cases even though there are a high number of elements and a low number of considered modes.