A study on the WPT-based structural damage alarming of the ASCE benchmark experiments

A workable realization procedure for damage alarming of frame structures is put forward based on energy variations of structural dynamic responses decomposed using wavelet packet transform in the paper. The WPT-based method consists of two steps: 1) calculation of the wavelet packet energy spectrum from the measured structural dynamic responses; 2) extraction of the damage alarming index ERVD from the wavelet packet energy spectrum, which is sensitive to structural local damage and insensitive to measurement noise. The ASCE benchmark experiments demonstrate the practicability of the damage alarming method for fame structures, which reveal that the WPT-based damage alarming index ERVD is a good candidate index that is sensitive to structural local damage affected by the actual measurement noise. Also, the experimental results reveal that the lower decomposition level and dominant frequency bands are sufficient for the detection of the damage occurrence using the index ERVD, which makes the proposed .damage alarming procedure practical.