Abstract
Damage detection in a structure from changes in global dynamic parameters has received considerable attention in the past few years from the civil, aerospace, and mechanical engineering communities. The basis for this approach is that changes in the structure's physical properties (i.e. boundary conditions, stiffness, mass, and damping) will, in turn, alter the dynamic characteristics of the structure, such as, resonant frequencies, modal damping and mode shapes. In this paper four different damage identification methods, based on changes on mode shapes and resonant frequencies, are applied and compared to detect and locate different damage types using experimental and numerical data extracted from simple steel beam. Some improvement has been introduced to these methods in order to increase the accuracy of localizing the damage position.
