Damage Identification of Full‐Scale Steel Truss Structure Based on Model Condensation and Mean‐Value Normalization Regularization Techniques

Structural health monitoring and damage identification aim to detect the internal damage and evaluate the health conditions of the practical engineering structure, which has been the most popular research field for several decades. The sensitivity‐based method incorporated with the regularization techniques is the classical and useful approach, and it can obtain accurate damage detection results. However, with the development of civil engineering structures, this classical method faces two problems: one is it is only applied to simple structures rather than full‐scale structures, and second is the iterative calculation efficiency is lower. Therefore, aiming at these drawbacks, the two improvement strategies have been introduced to the original method for its enhancement in the application potential and computational efficiency. The proposed method has been verified based on two examples, i.e., a numerical steel truss with 144 elements and a full‐scale experimental steel truss with 160 elements. The results prove that the proposed method has better efficiency and good application potential in the practical full‐scale engineering structure.