H−/H∞ structural damage detection filter design using an iterative linear matrix inequality approach

The existence of damage in different members of a structure can be posed as a fault detection problem. It is also necessary to isolate structural members in which damage exists, which can be posed as a fault isolation problem. It is also important to detect the time instants of occurrence of the faults/damage. The structural damage detection filter developed in this paper is a model-based fault detection and isolation (FDI) observer suitable for detecting and isolating structural damage. In systems, possible faults, disturbances and noise are coupled together. When system disturbances and sensor noise cannot be decoupled from faults/damage, the detection filter needs to be designed to be robust to disturbances as well as sensitive to faults/damage. In this paper, a new H−/H∞ and iterative linear matrix inequality (LMI) technique is developed and a new stabilizing FDI filter is proposed, which bounds the H∞ norm of the transfer function from disturbances to the output residual and simultaneously does not degrade the component of the output residual due to damage. The reduced-order error dynamic system is adopted to form bilinear matrix inequalities (BMIs), then an iterative LMI algorithm is developed to solve the BMIs. The numerical example and experimental verification demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can successfully detect and isolate structural damage in the presence of measurement noise.