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Cable-stayed bridges are widely used all around the world. Unfortunately, during their service life, they are exposed to adverse conditions that may cause their deterioration and, consequently, their collapse. Vibration-based structural health monitoring techniques have become the most promising alternatives for efficiently detecting and locating damage into civil structures. In this regard, this paper presents a new methodology based on statistical features, Principal component analysis (PCA), and Mahalanobis distance (MD) for detecting and locating a cable loss in the Río Papaloapan bridge (RPB) using vibration signals. It is based on the extraction of a set of statistical time features (STFs) from vibration signals, which are analyzed using the autocorrelation function (ACF) to denoise and strengthen the features found in them. Then PCA-based models are computed by using the STFs to enhance the damage location process. Then a new damage index based on MD is proposed to indicate if a damage exists and its location.

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Abstract.A fundamental aspect when dealing with rolling element bearings, which often represent a key component in rotating machineries, consists in correctly identifying a degraded behaviour of a bearing with a reasonable level of confidence. This is one of the main requirements a health and usage monitoring system (HUMS) should have. This paper introduces a monitoring technique for the diagnosis of bearing faults based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA). This method overcomes the problem of acquiring data under different environmental conditions (hardly biasing the data) and allows accurate damage recognition, also assuring a rather low number of False Alarms (FA). In addition, a novel criterion is proposed in order to isolate the area in which the faulty bearing stands. Another useful feature of this PCA-based method concerns the capability to observe an increasing trend in the evolution of bearing degradation. The described technique is tested on an industrial rig (designed by Avio S.p.A.), consisting of a full size aeroengine gearbox. Healthy and variously damaged bearings, such as with an inner or rolling element fault, are set up and vibration signals are collected and processed in order to properly detect a fault. Finally, data collected from a test rig assembled by the Dynamics & Identification Research Group (DIRG) are used to demonstrate that the proposed method is able to correctly detect and to classify different levels of the same type of fault and also to localise it.

A new multiple signal classification (MUSIC)-based methodology is presented for detecting and locating multiple damage types in a truss-type structure subjected to dynamic excitations. The methodology is based mainly on two steps: in step 1, the MUSIC method is employed to obtain the pseudo-spectra of vibration signatures, healthy and damaged, to be used for damage detection. In step 2, a new damage index, based on the obtained pseudo-spectra, is proposed to measure the structure condition. Furthermore, the damage location is estimated according to the variation in the amplitudes of the estimated pseudo-spectra. The presented results show that the proposed methodology can make an accurate and reliable estimation of the condition and location of three specific damage conditions, i.e., loosened bolts, internal corrosion, and external corrosion.