Abstract:In the operational lifetime, engineering structures will suffer joint damage inevitably under environmental loads, which may affect the integrity and functionality of structures, even cause the catastrophic event. In this paper, a method using chaotic excitation and attractor geometric property analysis to identify the joint damage is present. A chaotic excitation signal is used to interrogate the structure, and the measured structural response attractor is reconstructed in state space. A new feature based on the attractor local variance is extracted and used to identify the damage. The parameters influencing on feature extraction are also analyzed. An experimental cantilevered beam for joint damage identification is designed and the joint damage conditions are quantified by varying the fastener preload. Totally five different joint damage conditions are identified. The results show that this approach works well in detecting the joint damage and the feature is monotonic varying with the damage increase and the location for measuring response and calculation parameters have influence on the damage identification.