Two-Stage Structural Damage Assessment by Combining Modal Kinetic Energy Change with Symbiotic Organisms Search

In the literature, modal kinetic energy (MKE) has been commonly utilized for optimal sensor placement strategies. However, there have been very few studies on its application to structural damage detection. This paper introduces a new two-stage structural damage assessment method by combining the modal kinetic energy change ratio (MKECR) and symbiotic organisms search (SOS) algorithm. In the first stage, an efficient damage indicator, named MKECR, is used to locate the potential damaged sites. Meanwhile, for the purpose of comparison with MKECR, three other indices are also used. In the second stage, an SOS-based finite element (FE) model updating strategy is adopted to estimate the damage magnitude of identified sites, while excluding false warnings (if any), where an objective function is proposed using a combination of the flexibility matrix and modal assurance criterion (MAC). The performance of the SOS algorithm is also verified by comparing with four other meta-heuristic algorithms. Finally, three numerical examples of 2D truss and frame structures with various hypothetical damage scenarios are carried out to investigate the capability of the proposed method. The numerical results indicate that the proposed method not only can accurately locate and quantify single- and multi-damage in the structures, but also shows a great saving in computational cost.