A new method for nondestructive damage identification of lattice materials

This paper proposes vibration-based damage identification method, termed as substructure potential energy (SPE) method, which is capable of accurately estimating the damage magnitudes of multiple members. While other existing damage severity estimation methods require the information of several unabridged modes of the structure, the new method utilizes only a few lower mode shapes of substructures measured from the damaged solid. The performance of the proposed method is compared with one existing damage detection method, using a set of numerical simulations on a lattice material beam based on synthetic data generated from finite element models. Supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (“973”) (Grant No. 2006CB601206)