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One of the most important requirements in the evaluation of existing structural systems and ensuring a safe performance during their service life is damage assessment. Damage can be defined as a weakening of the structure that adversely affects its current or future performance which may cause undesirable displacements, stresses or vibrations to the structure. The mass and stiffness of a structure will change due to the damage, which in turn changes the measured dynamic response of the system. Damage detection can increase safety, reduce maintenance costs and increase serviceability of the structures. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are simplified models of the human brain and evolved as one of the most useful mathematical concepts used in almost all branches of science and engineering. ANNs have been applied increasingly due to its powerful computational and excellent pattern recognition ability for detecting damage in structural engineering. This paper presents and reviews the technical literature for past two decades on structural damage detection using ANNs with modal parameters such as natural frequencies and mode shapes as inputs.

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Damage in structures often leads to failure. Thus it is very important to monitor structures for the occurrence of damage. When damage happens in a structure the consequence is a change in its modal parameters such as natural frequencies and mode shapes. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are inspired by human biological neurons and have been applied for damage identification with varied success. Natural frequencies of a structure have a strong effect on damage and are applied as effective input parameters used to train the ANN in this study. The applicability of ANNs as a powerful tool for predicting the severity of damage in a model steel girder bridge is examined in this study. The data required for the ANNs which are in the form of natural frequencies were obtained from numerical modal analysis. By incorporating the training data, ANNs are capable of producing outputs in terms of damage severity using the first five natural frequencies. It has been demonstrated that an ANN trained only with natural frequency data can determine the severity of damage with a 6.8% error. The results shows that ANNs trained with numerically obtained samples have a strong potential for structural damage identification.

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