Concept of Virtual Work and Its Application on Damage Detection of Existing Structure

This paper focuses on establishing an effective system identification algorithm. Firstly the concept of virtual work is used to express the difference between the real structure and its analytical model, which is definition of an error estimator. Then by the improved Newton method, a SIA is developed to estimate the constitutive parameters in the analytical model. In order to study its properties in the face of measurement errors, Monte Carlo method is introduced to simulate the measured data. Theoretically the proposed virtual work error estimator (VWEE) can reduce the influence of measurement errors by increasing the number of measured data if those are assumed as random variables with normal distributions. The comparative studies are carried out between the two algorithms based on VWEE and displacement error estimator respectively in detail.