Detection of structural faults by modal data, lower bounds and shadow sites

Different algorithms have recently been developed for the diagnosis of many types of civil and mechanical structures using modal data, such as natural frequencies and mode shapes. Although many solutions have been proposed, some important questions seem to be absent in the technical literature. If changes in a structure's modal parameters are able to reflect structural faults, it is important to know what is the smallest detectable physical change in that structure. It is suggested that damage detection by means of modal data can be useful for macro-damage rather than for micro-damage. This resulted from numerical and experimental tests using a simple correlation between measurement noise and sensitivity of modal data, with respect to structural changes in different parts of a system. An automatic sensitivity approach is presented to obtain the lower bound of structural faults for the particular structure under study. The same automatic procedure is able to detect possible shadow sites within the frequency range analyzed.