Seismic-induced damage detection through parallel force and parameter estimation using an improved interacting Particle-Kalman filter

Standard filtering techniques for structural parameter estimation assume that the input force is either known or can be replicated using a known white Gaussian model. Unfortunately for structures subjected to seismic excitation, the input time history is unknown and also no previously known representative model is available. This invalidates the aforementioned idealization. To identify seismic induced damage in such structures using filtering techniques, force must therefore also be estimated. In this paper, the input force is considered to be an additional state that is estimated in parallel to the structural parameters. Two concurrent filters are employed for parameters and force respectively. For the parameters, an interacting Particle-Kalman filter is used to target systems with correlated noise. Alongside this, a second filter is used to estimate the seismic force acting on the structure. In the proposed algorithm, the parameters and the inputs are estimated as being conditional on each other, thus ensuring stability in the estimation. The proposed algorithm is numerically validated on a sixteen degrees-of-freedom mass-spring-damper system and a five-story building structure. The stability of the proposed filter is also tested by subjecting it to a sufficiently long measurement time history. The estimation results confirm the applicability of the proposed algorithm.