Inspection of Uncertainty Effects on Structural Fault Diagnosing of Transmission Towers

Structural damage detection in large‐scaled three dimensional structures is essential for ensuring their safety in service. A robust structural damage detection method must consider the characteristics of the target structure and damage in the development stage. Many identification methods have been proposed and further verified based on experimental data. However, few papers are reported on comparative investigation of several output‐only identification methods, especially based on measured signals from transmission towers. This work is an experimental investigation on a laboratory model of a transmission tower to develop the system identification methods using time series signal for long‐term structural health monitoring purposes. In a comparative investigation of two different methods, the difficulties in implementing damage detection techniques for complex structures has been discussed. The efficiency of the techniques is validated by different damage scenarios foreseen on the physical model. The results show that the developed methods are suitable for damage classification, but the uncertainty effects in the dynamic system must be considered an important factor influencing successful