Estimation of cracking, yield, and ultimate capacity of FRP-strengthened reinforced concrete and steel sections using wavelet transform

Damage detection is a topic of great importance for structural health monitoring. Many varieties of structural damage can be detected by examining changes in structural response in terms of stiffness. Wavelet transform is a powerful mathematical tool for the processing and time-frequency analysis of transient signals and has great potential to be used in structural damage detection. In FRP-strengthened reinforced concrete and steel sections, stiffness changes can be caused by cracking, yielding of steel components, crushing of concrete, or rupture of FRP panels. With the help of wavelet transform, it is possible to use the continuous measurements of the response to bend or torsional loading to estimate the capacity of the cross section corresponding to the stiffness changes. In this paper, bending of FRP-reinforced steel beams filled by concrete under bending and CFRP-reinforced concrete beams under pure torsion is evaluated. The results show that the location of the damage appears as perturbations in the diagram of discrete wavelet coefficients, which indicate the time of cracking, yielding of steel, crushing of concrete in the compression zone, and rupture of FRP. Therefore, a wavelet transform-based data processing procedure can be used to estimate the cracking and yielding capacities of the beams subjected to torsion, the yielding capacity of the steel and the ultimate capacity of the beams subjected to bending. The results demonstrate a high level of agreement between the estimates obtained from the discrete wavelet transform method and the examined experimental and numerical data.