GUW-based structural damage detection using WPT statistical features and multiclass SVM

• Intelligent structural damage detection is proposed based on WPT and SVM for SHM.
• The proposed method is employed for GUW-based damage detection for a thick beam.
• De-noising of GUW signals based on DWT is surveyed.
• The effects of different parameters on the sensitivity of the method are surveyed.
• By comparing with other algorithms, performance of the proposed method is verified.

Recently, guided ultrasonic waves (GUW) are widely used for damage detection in structural health monitoring (SHM) of different engineering structures. In this study, an intelligent damage detection method is proposed to be used in SHM applications. At first, GUW signal is de-noised by discrete wavelet transform (DWT). After that, wavelet packet transform (WPT) is employed to decompose the de-noised signal and the statistical features of decomposed packets are extracted as damage-sensitive features. Finally, a multiclass support vector machine (SVM) classifier is used to detect the damage and estimate its severity. The proposed method is employed for GUW-based structural damage detection of a thick steel beam. The effects of different parameters on the sensitivity of the method are surveyed. Furthermore, by comparing with some other similar algorithms, the performance of the proposed method is verified. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can appropriately detect a structural damage and estimate its severity.