Pacific Science Review, vol. 15, A, no 3, 2013, pp.

1~7

A Review on Strain Based Damage Detection Strategies for

Structural Health Monitoring
Peng Ren * and Zhi Zhou**
Abstract: Damage detection strategy plays a key role in civil structural health monitoring (SHM). Aiming
at the sensitivity of strain information on localized large deformation and internal stress redistribution
for capturing and tracking actual damage evolution process, a review on the state-of-the-art of strain
based damage detection strategies has been conducted. Recent advances in sensing tools included point
and distributed strain sensors are described. Strain mode obtained by dynamic strain information on
integrating local damage characteristics and global vibration based damage identification methods is
concluded in details. Finally, some existing problems and beneficial research directions for civil SHM
are pointed out.
Keywords: Damage detection strategy, Structural health monitoring, Strain sensing, Strain mode, Local
damage characteristic, Global damage identification;

individuality of the structure system, but also the

stochastic and the invisibility of the damage
distribution, resulting in most structural damage
detection strategies unreliable and impractical. To
obtain field damage information, the most important
foundation is the development of the sensing
technologies. Though the survivability of deployed
sensors is still a problem as worse as the measuring
accuracy after the packaging operations, optical fiber
sensors are a good means of settlement related to
previous electromagnetic ones [3-4]. On the other
hand, the development of optical fiber sensing
technologies, such as extending the gage length of
fiber bragg grating (FBG), arranging the FBG sensors
in series or Brillouin back scattering based optical
fiber sensor, could be achieved to cover the large
region of a structure to detect the arbitrary and
unforeseen damage [5-7]. However, this kind of
coverage is only suitable for special beams, plates,
bridge cables and even piles elements except truss
structures, so that the complex structure system
requires global damage detection strategies [8-9]. The
works have highlighted the potential advantages of
such sensors for their insensitivity to local stress
concentration, capability to obtain global structural
behavior, and applicability for different topologies or
networks, but most of them are limited to vibration
measurements from the installed acceleration sensors;

INTRODUCTION
Civil infrastructure is continuously prone to
deteriorating and accumulating damage during its
service time. The most urgent task for structural
health monitoring (SHM) to date is damage detection
using in-situ structural static and dynamic responses.
Structural damage can be characterized either as an
adverse mechanical behavior or as a measured
change in local stress/strain, global dynamic
parameters and physical models [1-2]. These issues
present significant challenges, such as how to use the
above changes to capture damage information,
including locate damage region, quantify damage
severity and track damage evolution base on the
measured structural responses. Therefore, the focus
on a proper damage detection strategy is essential to
enhance the reliability of a SHM system.
The reasons lie in not only the complexity and the
* PhD,Candidate
School of Civil Engineering,
Dalian University of Technology, China
E-mail : renpeng@mail.dlut.edu.cn
** Corresponding author, Professor
School of Civil Engineering,
Dalian University of Technology, China
E-mail : zhouzhi@dlut.edu.cn

Peng Ren and Zhi Zhou : A Review on Strain Based Damage Detection Strategies for Structural Health Monitoring

such methods for the practical application in civil

SHM have been inevitably corrupted by measurement noise and errors.
The nature of structural failure is local material
degradation under the action of external loads, and
thus long-term or transient damage evolution, leading
to component failure or even overall collapse. This
process can be attributed to the damage initiation and
evolution in the time and spatial scales. Strain
information is very sensitive to localized large
deformation and internal stress redistribution for
capturing and tracking this damage evolution. It not
only has the foundation as represented by optical
fiber sensors with sensing, packaging and deployment techniques, but also inverse problems analysis
with plenty of damage identification and model
updating methods, particularly suitable as a beneficial
exploring damage detection strategy. In this paper,
strain based damage detection strategies are reviewed
in detail from three aspects: point, (quasi-)
distributed and dynamic strain combined global
vibration information, and finally made some
interesting research proposals.

MAIN CONTENTS
Point Strain Gauges Based Damage
Detection
Fig 1. Several packaged point optical fiber sensors
from authors research group

Point strain sensors are initially used to measure

the engineering stress that is tightly coupled with
structural design performance and fatigue damage.
Sensing elements have seen a dramatic change from
electric resistance and vibrating wire strain gauges to
optical fiber strain sensors [10] as shown in Figure 1.
With the development of related materials and
packaged techniques, many smart components
combined optical fiber sensors have been used in
harsh environments of civil structural health monitoring [11]. Meanwhile, the measuring accuracy of the
packaged optical fiber sensors brought a strain
transfer problem [12]. Further studies were conducted
on strain transfer analysis of surface bonded and
embedded optical fiber sensors, considering the
elastic-plastic behavior with the different kinds of
packaging materials [13-14].

However, damage detection base on point strain

sensors results in fundamental drawbacks. First, the
survivability and durability of sensors in-situ is a
major problem. The life demand of a reliable civil
SHM system depends on the structural lifecycle. For
instance, the required service life of an embedded
sensor is 20 years and the surface bonding sensor is
3-5 years. Considering recent engineering experiences, the definition of durability could well have been
replaced by maintainability or replaceable ability.
In addition, point strain gauges may be too
expensive or impractical to instrument all elements
and components that are possibly critical because of
the large size and complexity of civil structures,
while damage is usually localized and location is

Pacific Science Review, vol. 15, A, no 3, 2013, pp. 1~7

unknown a priori [15]. So that the strain sensing

needs a distributed coverage detect the arbitrary and
unforeseen damage.

Distributed Strain Sensor Based Damage

Detection
As an advanced sensing technique, optical fiber
sensors have been extensively investigated for SHM
purpose due to their distributed sensing. Currently,
there are two types of distributed optical fiber sensors:
scattering based truly distributed optical fiber sensor
[16] and multiplexing FBG based quasi-distributed
optical fiber sensor [17].
The former has been developed base on Rayleigh,
Brillouin and Raman scattering, and the Brillouin
sensing is the most useful and important sensing
technique that has been used to monitor the localized
large deformation (macro-crack) of civil structures
[18].
The latter creates greater capacity of multiplexing
a large number of sensors for strain mapping along a
single fiber to facilitate quasi-distributed measurement, unlike traditional strain gauges that need a
huge amount of wiring.
Most of these researches are limited to a brief
introduction or conceptual envision such as describing an experiment or field application and then giving
some measurements from the installed sensors; the
exact benefits of such sensors for the practical
application in SHM are seldom investigated and
verified. Wu et al. proposed an extending the gauge
length of FBG and then arranging the long-gauge
FBG sensors in series [19]. The essential feature of
this sensor is the handling of an embedded tube,
inside which a bare optical fiber with FBG is sleeved
and fixed at two ends as shown in Figure 2. Longgauge FBG sensors are able to obtain the
measurements by integrating both local and global
information due to the fact that strain is a typical
local response and distributed sensor placement helps
to record the data covering the large region of a
structure. Meanwhile, global information can be
obtained from dynamic measurements.

Fig 2. Packaged long-gage FBG sensor from Ref. [6]

Though the advantages of long-gauge FBG sensor
are widely recognized, some flaws are still inevitable.
The well packaged strain sensors are so distributed
placed and fixed, and hence the arbitrary and
unforeseen damage regions, such as random cracks
along a concrete beam element, can represent the
average strain over the whole gauge length directly.
The averaging effect contains parts of several subgauge lengths that may be caused by a lot of microcracks or only a macro-crack. Then the question is
that what the real crack damage status is with the
measured strain mapping. Therefore, misjudgment of
random cracks along a concrete beam element is
inevitable. That also happens especially when a crack
opening occurs at the gap between two packaged
long-gauge strain sensors.

Damage Detection Using Dynamic Strain &

Global Information
To the best of our knowledge, longitudinal strain
can be obtained from the second derivative of the
displacement, which is also regarded as the main
reason on sensitivity of strain response due to local
damage. That is similar to the dynamic structure
system. Structural dynamic characteristics can also be
extracted as a means of strain. Basically as the same
principle as the displacement modal, structural strain
responses can be equivalent to the superposition of
all the orders of the strain modal shapes. In other
words, concerning the identification on modal shape,
3

Peng Ren and Zhi Zhou : A Review on Strain Based Damage Detection Strategies for Structural Health Monitoring

strain modes are equally effective as well as

displacement modes, but significantly sensitive to
localized damage detection [20-21]. Some comparisons between the two dynamic modes are illustrated
in Table 1.
The concept of strain mode generated in dynamic
strain testing of experimental mechanics. Hillary and
Ewins (1984) tested and calculated force-strain
transfer function by electric resistance strain gauges
to identify the modal parameters [22], thus proposed
the concept of strain mode for the first time. After
that, strain modal parameters have been understood
by time and frequency domain identification on the
beam-like and also frame-like structures [23-24]. It is
realized that the expressions of displacement and
strain frequency response functions share the same
denominators and only differ in numerators. It is well
stated in many literatures on modal analysis that
resonant frequency and damping ratio are uniquely
determined by the denominators whereas mode shape
is by the numerators. Meanwhile, Li et al give a more
systematic derivation of the strain frequency response
function to a kind of finite element formulation,
clarifying the metaphysical relationship between
strain and displacement modes [25-26].

They demonstrated that the damage severity can be

roughly estimated from the trend plot between the
damage index (DI) and severity; experimental tests
were carried out for validation [20]. The
disadvantages of the SFRF index contain: SFRF is
strongly influenced by noises, and it is hard to
calculate the frequency response function for each
element nodes in the actual test process.
The current strain mode based damage detection
strategy is to find the abrupt change-point of the
strain modal shape (SMS). A commen approach is to
directly subtract the values of SMS of the damaged
beam from that of the undamaged one at a measured
modal order. Through the establishment of macrostrains at a certain time and frequency domain from
long-gage FBG sensors installed onto a flexural
structure, Wu and Li took their modal macro-strain
vectors into the current damage detection strategies
[27-28]. The robustness and effectiveness of the
novel indexes had been verified by experimental
investigations [15]. In addition, Gu et al
demonstrated that the differential curve of the strain
modal shape (ISMSD) can be used to locate the
damage regions accurately [29] as shown in Table 2.
The formulation of this damage index is no need to
consider with the undamaged model, though is not
restricted to this, the differential method provides a
new way to handle strain modal shape data by signal
processing.
The strain energy method identifies damage based
on the change of strain energy in each element before
and after the occurrence of damage. There are many
indices that have been developed for damage
identification, such as the modal strain energy (MSE)
index. Stubbs and Kim demonstrated that modal
energies remain largely unchanged at locations
remote from the damage [30]. As a result, damage
characteristics can be represented by using modal
stiffness contributions from sub-members of the
beam. Based on MSE index, a damage locating
method with no need for a detailed analytical model
is presented for flexural structures by direct use of
dynamic strain data recorded by long-gauge optical
fiber sensors array [31]. The accuracy of that strategy
for damage quantification has yet to be verified.
However, it is clearly predicted that technological
progress of monitoring tools brings damage detection
strategies simple and effective solutions.

Table 1. Comparisons between displacement and

strain modes
Displacement mode
Resonant

Pros

frequency
acquisition
Extraction of
higher order
modes from
acceleration
sensors
Insensitivity for

Cons

localized
damage

Strain mode
Resonant frequency

acquisition
Localized damage

sensitivity
Damage index based

on strain modal
shape
Extraction of only

low order modes

from existing strain
sensors

The damage identification indicators based on

strain modes have passed through three stages as
shown in Table 2. In the era of point strain gauges,
the frequency response function (SFRF) is the easiest
to handle and directly extracted by strain response
signals. Yam et al. examined the sensitivity of SFRF
with respect to damage levels by proposing the index.
4

Pacific Science Review, vol. 15, A, no 3, 2013, pp. 1~7

global vibration information. Considering the

practical applications, ongoing flaws need to be
overcome, and some proposals are summarized as
follows:

Table 2. Typical strain mode based damage

identification indicators
DI

Equations for damage identification

H ij (r ) H ij (r )

ir =

SFRF
SMS
D

(a) Durability of present strain sensors could be

replaced by maintainability or even replaces
ability. In addition, the development of distributed
and robust strain measurements will be able to
promote the damage detection process.
(b) Aiming to service safety evaluation and
performance design, civil SHM need to provide
structural damage probabilities and actual
evolution processes in their life cycles. Damage
detection utilizing average effect of strain testing
due to fixed gauge is easy to result in damage
misjudgment. Some kinds of strain testing based
on auto-changed gauges are meaningful
objective for tracking actual damage evolution.
(c) Present damage identification methods mainly
focus on damage location, while seldom estimate
damage severity accurately. Local damage
character-istics need to be introduced into finite
elements for updating stiffness and mass matrix
directly.
(d) Local damage detection strategies such as strain
mode damage indexes used for beam-like
structures are hard to completely solve the
structural model errors or global failures. It is
essential to combine local damage characteristics
and traditional vibration based baseline model
updating approach.

max m {H ij (r )}

ir = ir ir

SMS

I ir =

ISMSD

ir =

l y i +1 y i

( xi +1 xi ) max m { yi }

( EI ) i
( EI ) i
m

MSD
=

[( ir ) 2 + ( ir ) 2 ] ( ir ) 2
i =1
m

i =1
m

[( ir ) + ( ir ) ] ( ir ) 2

i =1

i =1

(A beam-like structure with m elements for example, other

meaning of symbols at the end of this article)

Based on the above, dynamic strain measurements are capable of obtaining complete damage
information by integrating both local damage
sensitivity and global vibration characteristics.
However, this dynamic testing is still focused on
beam or plate-like structures in their potential
applications. Aiming to truss or framework structures
and the limited strain sensors, traditional global
damage identification also need to be carried out [32].
On the other hand, traditional vibration based
approaches seem too global for local damage
detection. Damage detection in a complex global
mode is facing a contradictory between robustness
and sensitivity. In a word, a baseline structural model
used to detect random damage status need to update
by integrating both local and global damage
characteristics.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The paper is financially supported by the National
Basic Research Program of China (973 Program)
(Grants No. 2011CB013705) and the National
Scientific Support program of China (Grants No.
2011BAK02B01).

CONCLUSIONS & PROPOSALS

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APPENDIXES
Symbols
ir _damage index at location i in the rth strain modes
m _numbers of modes
_damage status
H ij (r ) _strain transfer function at location i for the

excit-ation at location j
ir _SMS element in the rth strain modes at location i
xi _ abscissa of peak value in difference curve of
SMS
y i _ordinate of peak value in difference curve of
SMS
( EI ) i _ stiffness of the ith element