Physics-guided deep learning based on modal sensitivity for structural damage identification with unseen damage patterns

Recently, wide attention has been paid to develop deep learning-based models for structural damage identification. However, in most of the studies, the pure deep learning-based structural damage identification methods lack physical interpretability and scientific consistency for generalization. Therefore, although such methods can achieve good damage identification results when data with similar damage patterns used for training and testing the network model, they usually give poor predictions in the unseen domain, i.e., the network’s extrapolation ability is limited. In this research, a physics-guided deep learning neural network (PGDLNN) is proposed by incorporating the physical loss constructed by structural modal parameters sensitivity analysis into the original Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for structural damage identification. The model’s physical interpretability is improved, which can lead to more accurate damage identification results, especially in the domain with unseen damage patterns in training the network model. Numerical and experimental studies on simply supported beams are carried out to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. The influences of measurement noise and incomplete measurements are also investigated. The results show that the incorporation of physical knowledge to deep learning model can enhance the generalization of the network, and hence improve the accuracy of damage severity quantification. This study not only performs damage localization and quantification simultaneously using the physics-guided deep learning neural network, but also demonstrates the superiority of incorporating physical knowledge into data-driven deep learning models for structural health monitoring.