ICNPAA 2010: Mathematical Problems in
Engineering, Aerospace and Sciences

Although many damage detection methods have been developed to detect damage in a structure using measured modal parameters, most of them have to make use of modal data of the structure for the intact state as baseline or a correlated finite element model. For beamlike structures, curvature techniques as mode shape and flexibility curvatures have been applied for localizing damage. An approximate flexibility matrix can be derived using a lot of number of vibration modes whose columns are referred as flexibility shapes. In this paper, a damage localization method is developed based on changes in flexibility shapes as well as its curvature. Differential Quadrature Method (DQM) is implemented in order to obtain the curvatures of flexibility shapes. As shown before by other authors, this method is sufficient for modeling damage. To reduce error values due to experimental data differentiation, a moving curve fit method as well as DQM is implemented on flexibility shapes. The proposed method is validated by numerical and experimental case studies.