A Novel Damage Detection Method of Reinforced Concrete Frames Using Signal Processing and Extracted Near-Fault Fling-Step Pulses

A new model-free output-only signal processing-based damage detection procedure was carried out in this paper. First of all, a finite element model as the representative of reinforced concrete (RC) frames was constructed and subjected to a specific loading protocol in OpenSees. The protocol consisted of 9 consequent different near-fault fling-step pulse-type earthquake records with low-amplitude white noises among them to simulate the collapse procedure. The analysis process was complemented in three levels: (a) the Fourier transform was utilized to extract the vibration frequency, (b) the time instants of damage occurrence were detected by using the discrete wavelet transform, and (c) accurate damage detection was made by using the extracted pulse components of the records as loading protocol for earthquake simulation and the discrete wavelet transform. The results revealed that the proposed combinatorial method could efficiently diagnose the damage in the RC frames. Also, applying a pulse component instead of an original record increases the accuracy of damage detection by 70%.