Locate damage based on change in structural shape for civil space structures

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a number of collapses of civil space structures, which have severely jeopardized the safety of the general public. Therefore, it is imperative to propose an approach that can localize damage to exact members at an early stage for space structures. Then, the obtained damage location results can be used by the maintenance/repair crew for taking timely actions. For most space structures, the member configuration possesses a regular pattern. For this type of structure, before damage occurs, the regular pattern in the member configuration is maintained. After damage occurs, the regular pattern around the damaged member will be destroyed. In this study, the proposed approach to locate damage is based on the change in the status of regularity of member configuration. Herein the difference in an angle of the triangular shape in the related region of a space structure is used to indicate whether the regularity of member configuration is maintained. To validate the proposed approach, a reticulated shell space structure will be investigated.

Damage localization using shape change in uniform load surface for civil large-span space structures

“…Instead of investigating the shape change of the geometric shape calculated from the real displacements as in Yan et al (2016), the present authors propose to locate damage using the shape change in the ULS, which will be reflected from the change in interior angles of the shapes formed by structural members on the ULS. Take a Kiewitt 8 dome structure shown in Figure 1 as an example.…”

“…Considering that the member configuration of this type of structure may follow a regular pattern and damage in a local region may destroy the regular pattern, a damage detection approach based on the change in structural shape has been proposed by the present authors (Yan et al, 2016). In that approach, to obtain the change in structural shape due to damage, the displacements at joints between members are required to be measured.…”