Identification of earthquake induced structural damage based on synchroextracting transform

Abstract

Several popular time-frequency techniques, including the Wigner-Ville distribution, smoothed pseudo-Wigner-Ville distribution, wavelet transform, synchrosqueezing transform, Hilbert-Huang transform, and Gabor-Wigner transform, are investigated to determine how well they can identify damage to structures. In this work, a synchroextracting transform (SET) based on the short-time Fourier transform is proposed for estimating post-earthquake structural damage. The performance of SET for artificially generated signals and actual earthquake signals is examined with existing methods. Amongst other tested techniques, SET improves frequency resolution to a great extent by lowering the influence of smearing along the time-frequency plane. Hence, interpretation and readability with the proposed method are improved, and small changes in the time-varying frequency characteristics of the damaged buildings are easily detected through the SET method.