Structural Damage Assessment using an Artificial Immune System
Structural damage assessment methodologies allow providing knowledge about the current state of the structure. This information is important because allows to avoid possible accidents and perform maintenance tasks in the structure. This chapter proposes the use of an artificial immune system to detect and classify damages in structures by using data from a multi-actuator piezoelectric system that is working in several actuation phases. In a first step of the methodology, principal component analysis (PCA) is used to build a baseline model by using the collected data. In a second step, the same experiments under similar conditions are performed with the structure in different states (damaged or not). These data are projected into the different baseline models for each actuator, in order to obtain the damages indices and build the antigens. The antigens are compared with the antibodies by using an affinity function and the result of this process allows detecting and classifying damages.