Milad Jahangiri

Vibration-based structural health monitoring (VSHM) relying on model updating methods has been developed greatly and nowadays, not only serves as a major subset of SHM, but also shapes a special class of optimization problems. The historical course of evolution of this field via different research groups and with different goals and objectives, has resulted in the emergence of multiple objective functions, each appropriate only for certain damage scenarios and incapable of reasonably addressing others. The natural frequency residual (NFR) is an objective function sensitive to the damage intensity, which in the meantime, fails to predict the damage location in the symmetric structures. The total modal assurance criterion (TMAC) is another objective function which is sensitive to the damage position, but fails to estimate of the damage severity in the uniformly damaged structures. The present work successfully provides an innovative solution to unify both aforementioned objectives in a holistic objective function (HOF), through a particular combination of NFR and TMAC. Additionally, the competency of the above HOF for solving the VSHM problems has been investigated and demonstrated using a symbiotic organism search (SOS) optimization algorithm. The robustness and efficiency of the proposed VSHM method are verified through assessment of two un-damped benchmark structures. The obtained results indicate that in all damage scenarios, the HOF predicts with a high precision the damage location and succeeds in the high accuracy estimation of the damage extent. Consequently, the combination of the proposed HOF criterion and the SOS optimization algorithm is recommended as a reliable technique for VSHM.