An Experimental Study on the Detection of Bolt-Loosening Joints of Truss Structure

Abstract

Truss structure damage is likely to exist at joints that interconnect the members, rather than in a single member, such as a flexural beam. This report presents a damage detection method to trace the bolt-loosening joints of a truss structure using only data measured from an impact hammer test. In this experimental work, using impact hammer and accelerometers, the bolt-loosening joints are detected by Proper Orthogonal Mode (POM) curves extracted from measured Frequency Response Functions (FRFs) and the Power Spectrum Estimation (PSE) in the frequency domain transformed from the measurement data in the time domain and its POM curves. This experimental study on truss structures investigates and compares the applicability of these approaches under the existence of equipment and environmental errors.