Section: Application Domains

Vibrations-based monitoring

Detecting and localizing damages for monitoring the integrity of structural and mechanical systems is a topic of growing interest, due to the aging of many engineering constructions and machines and to increased safety norms. Many current approaches still rely on visual inspections or local non destructive evaluations performed manually. This includes acoustic, ultrasonic, radiographic or eddy-current methods; magnet or thermal field techniques, $...$. These experimental approaches assume an a priori knowledge and the accessibility of a neighborhood of the damage location. Automatic global vibration-based monitoring techniques have been recognized to be useful alternatives to those local evaluations [31] . However this has led to actual damage monitoring systems only in the field of rotating machines.

A common feature of the structures to be monitored (e.g. civil engineering structures subject to hurricanes or earthquakes, but also swell, wind and rain; aircrafts subject to strength and turbulences, $...$) is the following. These systems are subject to both fast and unmeasured variations in their environment and small slow variations in their vibrating characteristics. The available data (measurements from e.g. strain gauges or accelerometers) do not separate the effects of the external forces from the effect of the structure. The external forces vary more rapidly than the structure itself (fortunately !), damages or fatigues on the structure are of interest, while any change in the excitation is meaningless. Expert systems based on a human-like exploitation of recorded spectra can hardly work in such a case : the changes of interest (1% in eigenfrequencies) are visible neither on the signals nor on their spectra. A global health monitoring method must rather rely on a model that will help in discriminating between the two mixed causes of the changes that are contained in the measurements.

Classical modal analysis and vibration monitoring methods basically process data registered either on test beds or under specific excitation or rotation speed conditions. However there is a need for vibration monitoring algorithms devoted to the processing of data recorded in-operation, namely during the actual functioning of the considered structure or machine, without artificial excitation, speeding down or stopping.

Health monitoring techniques based on processing vibration measurements basically handle two types of characteristics: the structural parameters (mass, stiffness, flexibility, damping) and the modal parameters (modal frequencies, and associated damping values and mode-shapes); see [35] and references therein. A central question for monitoring is to compute changes in those characteristics and to assess their significance. For the frequencies, crucial issues are then: how to compute the changes, to assess that the changes are significant, to handle correlations among individual changes. A related issue is how to compare the changes in the frequencies obtained from experimental data with the sensitivity of modal parameters obtained from an analytical model. Furthermore, it has been widely acknowledged that, whereas changes in frequencies bear useful information for damage detection, information on changes in (the curvature of) mode-shapes is mandatory for performing damage localization. Then, similar issues arise for the computation and the significance of the changes. In particular, assessing the significance of (usually small) changes in the mode-shapes, and handling the (usually high) correlations among individual mode-shape changes are still considered as open questions [35] , [31] .

Controlling the computational complexity of the processing of the collected data is another standard monitoring requirement, which includes a limited use of an analytical model of the structure. Moreover, the reduction from the analytical model to the experimental model (truncated modal space) is known to play a key role in the success of model-based damage detection and localization.

The approach which we have been developing, based on the foundations in modules  3.2 – 3.5 , aims at addressing all the issues and overcoming the limitations above.