A substructure approach to local damage detection of shear structure

We propose a substructure approach that allows for the local damage detection of a shear structure. This method requires only three sensors to identify localized damage in any story of a shear structure building. A substructure approach was used in this method to divide a complete structure into several substructures in order to significantly reduce the number of unknown parameters for each substructure so that damage detection processes can be independently conducted on each substructure. Thus, our method is suitable for use in a parallel and distributed damage detection system. Simulations and experiments on five-story buildings were conducted to test the feasibility of our proposed method. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.