Abstract
Today, identifying the damage or failure location in a structure is a novel topic in engineering sciences. In the civil engineering discipline also this topic has twofold importance. There are structures with very high importance which their failure could result in a disaster and this increases the importance of this topic. One of the structures which is of great importance in terms of the cost and application is dam structure. Not identifying the local damages in this super structure and their expansion would result intotal and abrupt damages and consequently imposing major financial costs and fatalities at the national and global levels. This article intends to study the damage location in the concrete arch dam considering the modal properties of dams. Therefore, by finite element modelling of a concrete arch dam in Abaqus software, the dam frequencies were extracted. Then, through different damage scenarios including ۹ different locations and ۳ damage levels together with changes in the modal properties of the system before and after damage, were investigated. Using the frequency response functions of the healthy and damaged structures, and stochastic model of structure, an objective function is established and using the ant algorithm optimization method, the function is minimized. In order to investigate the efficiency of the proposed method, a numerical example of dam is considered. The obtained results show the efficiency of the proposed method in accurate determining of the damage location and intensity