COMBINED APPLICATION OF WAVELET PACKET ANALYSIS AND INFORMATION FUSION ON STRUCTURAL DAMAGE ALARMING

In order to improve the robustness to ambient vibration tests, information fusion technique is imported into a structural damage alarming method using wavelet packet analysis. The wavelet packet energy spectrum identified under ambient vibration tests are fused using D-S evidence theory to obtain improved wavelet packet energy spectrum, on the basis of which structural damage indices are calculated. The experiment results of ASCE Benchmark structure reveal that: 1) the structural damage alarming method using wavelet packet analysis and information fusion technique have preferable damage alarming capacity and can effectively detect the structural initial damage using ambient vibration tests; 2) The effective information can be extracted from the testing samples of wavelet packet energy spectrum under ambient vibration tests using D-S evidence theory and hence more robust identification results can be obtained. The proposed method is well suitable for real-time damage alarming of engineering structures.