A New Structural Damage Identification Method Based on Wavelet Packet Energy Entropy of Impulse Response

Excitation makes a great influence on the wavelet energy distribution of the response signal, this deficiency leads that the traditional structural damage identification method based on wavelet energy has a low precision. In order to solve this problem, a new structural damage identification method based on wavelet packet energy entropy (WPEE) of impulse response is presented in this paper. Firstly, natural excitation technique (NExT) is adopted to extract structural impulse response. Then, WPEE of the impulse response is computed, and the change rate of WPEE is used to construct the structural damage index. An experiment of damage identification on a pile structure is provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experiment results show that this method can accurately identify the single damage and multi-damage.