Strategies for an efficient indicator of structural damage

Structural health monitoring is nowadays a problem of major concern, as recent catastrophic failures of in-operation civil structures with important human losses and high costs demonstrate.A global assessment method with sufficient sensitivity and reliable enough to detect incipient damage in order to prevent unexpected failures is necessary.Pursuing this goal, in this paper some new developments of the detection and relative damage quantification indicator, concerning the detection, localization and also the relative severity of damage are presented. This method, based on the use of the frequency domain assurance criterion and of the response vector assurance criterion, seems to be an effective damage indicator. To illustrate the procedure, the authors present some numerical simulations, as well as some experimental examples taken on two beams.