Wavelet transform for damage identification in continuous beams

Damage identification has been an area of focused research over the decades. Several procedures are being tried out to improve the efficiency of the damage identification methodology. In the recent years, wavelet transform has been tried out to solve damage identification in civil engineering structures. In the present work, wavelet transforms have been used to identify the damage from the static deflection response of continuous beams. The focus of the present work is to highlight that wavelet transform can be used to arrive at a generalised methodology to solve the damage detection and quantification in any ‘n-span’ continuous beam structures. A damage intensity factor has been proposed to solve the damage quantification problem. Several studies have been carried out to demonstrate the methodology and to validate the same.