Online structural damage state identification of concrete arch dams under dynamic loads using a recursive TVARX approach

Concrete arch dams have been widely constructed worldwide, and many of these dams are located in areas with high seismic activity. However, strong seismic loading poses a severe threat to concrete arch dams, and dams have the risk of suffering damage and the possibility of an ensuing dam break. In past decades, seismic and structural health monitoring has undergone rapid growth in the context of arch dams to track the operation state of arch dams under strong seismic loading. In fact, arch dams with damage caused by seismic loading normally exhibit nonlinear dynamic behaviors and time-variable dynamic properties. To effectively identify the structural damage state development of arch dams under seismic loading, an online damage identification method using a novel recursive time-variable autoregressive with exogenous (TVARX) input model was presented in this paper. To improve the tracking capability for the time-variable coefficients of the TVARX model, an adaptive adjustment algorithm of variable weighting factors was incorporated into the recursive least-squares method. In the proposed method, the predicted model residual, a damage index named the fit ratio (FR), the difference between fit ratios (DF), and a damage index based on the change in ARX model parameters (CH) were proposed to identify the presence of damage, damage area, and relative damage extent for arch dams. Eventually, the proposed approach was used for the online damage state identification of arch dams in a numerical simulation example and a shaking table test, and the identification results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach.