Structural Damage Identification for Bridge Using Moving Phase Space Reconstruction With a Single Sensor

Existing vibration‐based damage identification methods face significant challenges in practical engineering applications due to the reliance on a large number of sensors. To overcome the limitation, this paper proposes a novel structural damage identification method based on moving phase space reconstruction, which can use only a single sensor for effective damage identification. The proposed method introduces the concept of a subphase space and adopts an improved damage indicator to analyze the degree of topological change of phase trajectories at different time points. The parameters required for this method are completely determined by the vibration signal, without the need for detailed geometric or material data of the structure. To verify the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed method, the numerical simulation of a simply supported beam is carried out, and then the experimental verification is conducted on a hollow box girder. The results show that the proposed method can successfully identify and locate structural damage using only the vibration data of a single sensor and can effectively evaluate the degree of topological change in phase trajectories over time.