Substructure Damage Identification Based on Model Updating of Frequency Response Function

Model updating of large-scale structures is difficult to carry out when using a frequency response function (FRF) for damage identification, as the solutions for the global system matrices with too many degrees of freedom are required in each iteration. In this paper, a substructure damage identification method is proposed based on the model updating of the acceleration FRF. The original finite element model is divided into several substructures using the improved reduced system (IRS) by the dynamic condensation method, resulting in the simplified substructure model. The final simplified model is composed of the simplified mass matrix and stiffness matrix of the substructure considered. The damage acceleration FRF to be identified is used to iteratively update the simplified model. The locations and extents of the damage elements are obtained by updating the results, which reduces the number of uncertain parameters to be updated and leads to the rapid convergence of the optimization process. In the iteration, L1 norm regularization is introduced to solve the ill-posed problem, which improves the stability of the identification results. A numerical simulation of a six-story steel frame structure under various working conditions was carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, which was also validated by the experiments. The robustness and performance of the proposed damage identification method based on substructures have been demonstrated.