Damage Detection of Composite Structure Using Independent Component Analysis

Abstract

This paper studies the application of independent component analysis (ICA) to structural health monitoring (SHM). The ICA technique is used to extract features from measurement sensors of a smart composite structure. To enhance information about damage, we propose a new damage detection methodology, based on the analysis of a symmetric matrix obtained from the mixing matrix. The subspaces associated to the symmetric matrix are used to define a damage index (DI). Furthermore, we propose a bound associated to this DI and decision on the state of the structure is taken. Experimentation on a composite smart structure shows the performance of the proposed approach.