Damage identification in bridges based on WPECD transform

Bridges suffer damage throughout their lives due to variations in the performance of the materials, loads, and other uncontrollable factors. During the service period of the structure, the key parts will continue to accumulate damage and defects trapped, affecting the safety of its use. Therefore, structural health monitoring is important for engineering structures. In this work, the numerical and experimental verifications are used to verify the effectiveness of the wavelet packet energy curvature difference (WPECD) method in identifying structural damage, the beam body replaced by the bridge model is used to simulate the two damage levels. In this work the damage level increases from 5% to 20%. The acceleration response of each point in intact and damaged states was tested, and the WPECD method was used to identify the damage, and the effect of the number of decomposition layers and the wavelet function on the Knot identification effect were studied. The results of the presented method show that the WPECD technique is more effective for damage, and sensitive in small lesions (5%), it can also be effectively identified. It shows that the method is effective and can be applied to practical engineering.