Output-Only Damage Detection of Steel Beam Using Moving Average Filter

This paper provides a simple and direct output-only baseline-free method to detect damage from the noisy acceleration data by using Moving Average Filter (MAF). MAF is a convolution approach based on a simple filter kernel (rectangular shape) that works as an averaging method to smooth signal and remove incorporated noise. In this paper, a method is proposed to employ MAF to smooth acceleration signals obtained from a series of accelerometers and determine the damage location along a steel beam. To verify the proposed method, a simply supported beam was modelled through a 3D numerical simulation and an experimental model under a moving vehicle load. The response acceleration data was then recorded at a sampling frequency of 500 Hz. Finally, damage location was identified by applying the proposed method. The results showed that the proposed method can accurately estimate the damage location from the acceleration signal without applying any frequency filtering or baseline correction.