Direct Use of the Savitzky–Golay Filter to Develop an Output-Only Trend Line-Based Damage Detection Method

The Savitzky–Golay filter (SGF) is a time-domain technique that determines a trend line for a signal. The direct application of SGF for damage localization and quantification is investigated in this paper. Therefore, a single-stage trend line-based damage detection method employing SGF is proposed in which the damage is located and quantified at the bridge under moving load. A simply supported beam under moving sprung mass is numerically simulated to verify the proposed method. Four different velocities and five different single- and multi-damage scenarios are considered. The acceleration data along the beam are obtained, manually polluted with noise and their trend lines are then determined using SGF. The results show that the proposed method can accurately locate and quantify the damage using these trend lines. It is proved that the proposed method is insensitive to the noise and velocity variation in which having a constant velocity is a hard task before and after damage. Additionally, defining a normalization factor and fitting a Gaussian curve to this factor provide an estimation for the baseline and therefore, it categorizes the proposed method as baseline-free method.