Damage detection under temperature conditions using PCA: an application to the Z24 Bridge

Vibration properties of civil structures, which are commonly analysed for damage detection, are affected by changing environmental and operational conditions, and most notably are subjected to bilinear effects from changing ambient temperature conditions. Therefore, damage detection in structures during the past decade has focused on eliminating the effects of these changing environments that affect the vibration properties of the structures. Several methods have been proposed in the literature to tackle the non-linear effects from changing environments. However, these methods can only analyse systems (e.g. natural frequency–environmental and operational system) that have an incremental change in relationship; they cannot model the bilinear effects from the changing temperature conditions, which may lead to false alerts. Hence, a damage detection method is proposed in this paper to tackle the piecewise effects from changing temperature conditions. The method makes use of a Gaussian mixture model to separate the different effects acting on the structures and uses principal component analysis for data processing. The method is applied to the Z24 Bridge, in Switzerland, which was subjected to bilinear effects from changing temperature conditions. The results obtained demonstrate that the proposed method successfully takes into account the piecewise effects to indicate the presence of damage.