Experimental investigation of frequency-based multi-damage detection for beams using support vector regression

A frequency-based damage detection method in conjunction with the support vector regression is presented. The wavelet finite element method is used for numerical simulation to determinate the relationship database between multi-damage locations/depths and natural frequencies of a beam. Then, support vector regression is applied to extract the damage locations and depths from the database due to its ability in handling nonlinearity, finding global solutions, and processing high dimensional input vector. Finally, a large number of experiments have been carried out to further examine the performance of the proposed method.