Review on Structural damage diagnosis under varying environmental conditions—part II:

local PCA for non-linear cases – A M. Yan, G. Kerschen, P. De Boe, J.-C. Golinval

The aim of vibration-based structural health – monitoring methods is to detect the appearance of
damages by evaluating changes in the identified vibration characteristics. However, changes in
vibration features due to damage may be masked by the effects of environmental variations.
Therefore, it is of primary importance to take into account the masking effects of environmental
variations in the diagnostics. Linear method based on principle component analysis (PCA) has been
proposed and has shown encouraging results for linear or even weekly non-linear cases. The paper
concerns a further extension of the proposed method to handle non-linear cases, which may be
encountered in some complex structures. In this method a vector quantisation technique is used
in local PCA, which involves a two-step procedure, namely a clustering of the data space into
several regions and then the application of PCA in each local region. The application of local PCA
allows performing a piecewise linearisation of the non-linear problem.

PCA may be viewed as an optimal linear tool in the sense that it allows to minimise the distance in
the least squares sense between the original signals and their dimension-reduced representation.
Although PCA has been used for the analysis of non-linear problem. One way for improving its
capability to deal with non-linearity is to increase the order of PCA modal, this may lead to better
result. However, this approach may not always be sufficient and it is contrary to the objective of
dimension seduction.

In local principal component analysis, data space is partitioned into subregions. Each subregion data
set is described by a hyperplane, which results in the application of local PCA. The key issue in this
procedure is how to properly cluster the data regions. Two new data-partition strategies are
proposing in this paper: the first one is appropriate for damage diagnosis under changing
environmental conditions; the second one is rather a general technique for extensive applications.

Considering a numerical example of data partition, the data partition in hyper-sphere model based
on data structure observation, the data may be easily partitioned into two regions by choosing a
turning point at co-ordinates and each subregion may be well approached by a local PCA model.
Now using second approach i.e., partition based on a combined criterion of Euclidean and
reconstruction norms. The idea is to take advantages of both approaches (i.e., Euclidean partition
and Projection partition) but to avoid their drawbacks. Comparing the second approach with the two
existing ones by vector-quantisation technique. It may be observed that the data partitioning results
either by the Euclidean partition a or by the projection partition approach are not ideal as former
results in a uniform partition and latter may lead to undesirable disjointed partition. The preposed
method leads to improvement.

Comparing the results of linear and non-linear analysis of a simulated bridge modal as stated in the
companion paper. It may be observed that the introduced damages are well detected by both PCA
and local PCA analyses, although the non-linearity introduces a little distortion in the reference
data when using PCA.

An in situ experiment conducted in Z24-bridge located in Switzerland, the bridge was monitored for
305 days. During the period, the bridge was subjected to a series of realistic damage cases. It was
also found that the asphalt layer on the bridge surface plays a different role during warm and cold
periods, which in turn causes non-linearity. Using the PCA-based damage detection method
proposed in the present paper, the problem becomes much simpler: only natural frequencies are
needed to directly determine if the structure is damaged. Results obtained using linear PCA are
quite satisfactory as the introduced various damages are well detected. However, an abnormality
appears during very cold weather causing freezing of the asphalt layer on the bridge surface. It
results in strong non-linear behaviour of the structure. To improve the present detection, two data
partition techniques are used and local PCA may be proposed in each subregion. The comparison
of the results obtained by using local PCA with the obtained by linear PCA, the abnormality due to
cold weather is disappears and Novelty Index (NI) value increases indicating local PCA-based
method is more sensitive to the damage, highlighting efficiency and suitability of local PCA based
approach for structural health monitoring under varying environmental conditions.