Stability Analysis and Novel Damage Identification of Multispan Fluid‐Conveying Pipes Immersed in a Fluid Using Orthogonal Matching Pursuit

Understanding the stability and damage behavior of fluid‐conveying pipes is crucial in many engineering applications, including offshore and energy systems. This paper proposes a novel and unified framework for stability analysis and damage identification of a multispan fluid‐conveying pipe submerged in an external fluid, addressing a problem that has not previously been systematically investigated. Moreover, the paper presents a detailed stability analysis, examining how various key system parameters influence the critical flow velocities associated with different vibration modes. The study introduces a systematically constructed and normalized sparse dictionary within the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) framework, explicitly defined from the structure’s mode shapes to enable consistent and reproducible sparse reconstruction. The OMP implementation employs clearly defined sparsity and stopping criteria to ensure reproducibility of the damage identification procedure. The proposed method demonstrates significantly improved accuracy in damage detection compared to conventional dictionaries. Validation is carried out in two benchmark cases: (i) a single‐span pipe conveying internal moving fluid and submerged in an external fluid and (ii) a multispan beam in the absence of surrounding fluids; in both cases, good agreement with existing studies is observed. In addition, to evaluate the practical applicability of the proposed damage identification method, an experimental test was conducted to detect damage in a fluid‐conveying pipe submerged in an external fluid.