Damage detection of thin plate structure using wavelet finite element method

This study presents a sub-element damage detection method for thin plate structure based on multi-scale wavelet finite element model (WFEM). Multi-scale dynamical equations of thin plate structures for obtaining the modal parameters is first derived with the tensor product of cubic Hermite multi-wavelets as shape functions. Then model updating technique is employed to detect sub-element damage in a progressive manner, i.e., the suspected damage region is first identified using a low-scale structural model, and then more accurate damage detection results are obtained using a multi-scale model with local refinement. During the detection process, the scales of wavelet elements in the WFEM are adaptively enhanced in the most concerned regions, while the modal properties from the tests remains the same. A numerical example is conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.