WAVELET TRANSFORM BASED METHOD FOR DETECTING DAMAGE LOCATION OF ELECTRICITY TRANSMISSION TOWERS

Wavelet transform based method is investigated to identify the damage location of structures by using the spatial domain information of structures. Structure deformation curve is decomposed in one scale by using the bi-orthogonal wavelet bior6.8 to identify the damage locations of uniform and non-uniform cantilever beams. The results show that the spatial domain information wavelet transform can reveal structural damage location very efficiently. Considering the complexity of civil engineering structures and incompleteness of input, a wavelet transform based method is proposed to identify the damage location of structures by using their vibration profile under ambient excitation. The proposed method is applied to the damage detection of tall electricity transmission tower. It is shown that the method can identify the damage location of high-rise latticed tower with uniform stiffness or gradual changing stiffness along the height effectively, but fails for the latticed tower with abrupt change in stiffness.