Damage Identification in Plate Structures Using Sparse Regularization Based Electromechanical Impedance Technique

This paper proposes a novel structural damage quantification approach using a sparse regularization based electromechanical impedance (EMI) technique. Minor structural damage in plate structures by using the measurement of only a single surface bonded lead zirconate titanate piezoelectric (PZT) transducer was quantified. To overcome the limitations of using model-based EMI based methods in damage detection of complex or relatively large-scale structures, a three-dimensional finite element model for simulating the PZT–structure interaction is developed and calibrated with experimental results. Based on the sensitivities of the resonance frequency shifts of the impedance responses with respect to the physical parameters of plate structures, sparse regularization was applied to conduct the undetermined inverse identification of structural damage. The difference between the measured and analytically obtained impedance responses was calculated and used for identification. In this study, only a limited number of the resonance frequency shifts were obtained from the selected frequency range for damage identification of plate structures with numerous elements. The results demonstrate a better performance than those from the conventional Tikhonov regularization based methods in conducting inverse identification for damage quantification. Experimental studies on an aluminum plate were conducted to investigate the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed approach. To test the robustness of the proposed approach, the identification results of a plate structure under varying temperature conditions are also presented.