Structural impedance based damage diagnosis by piezo‐transducers

Abstract

Although structural mechanical impedance is a direct representation of the structural parameters, its measurement is difficult at high frequencies owing to practical considerations. This paper presents a new method of damage diagnosis by means of changes in the structural mechanical impedance at high frequencies. The mechanical impedance is extracted from the electro‐mechanical admittance signatures of piezoelectric‐ceramic (PZT) patches surface bonded to the structure using the electro‐mechanical impedance (EMI) technique. The main feature of the newly developed approach is that both the real as well as the imaginary component of the admittance signature is used in damage quantification. A complex damage metric is proposed to quantify damage parametrically based on the extracted structural parameters, i.e. the equivalent single degree of freedom (SDOF) stiffness, the mass, and the damping associated with the drive point of the PZT patch. The proposed scheme eliminates the need for any a priori information about the phenomenological nature of the structure or any ‘model’ of the structural system. As proof of concept, the paper reports a damage diagnosis study conducted on a model reinforced concrete (RC) frame subjected to base vibrations on a shaking table. The proposed methodology was found to perform better than the existing damage quantification approaches, i.e. the low‐frequency vibration methods as well as the traditional raw‐signature based damage quantification in the EMI technique. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.