Structural health monitoring (SHM) using artificial neural networks has received increasing attention due to robustness of neural networks, better performance compared to conventional damage detection methods, and influential pattern recognition capability. This article aims to introduce Hopfield neural network (HNN), for the first time, to the SHM community. On this basis, a novel damage identification method by the HNN is proposed to detect damage and estimate damage severity with the aid of measured mode shapes in undamaged and damaged conditions. In this method, these vibration characteristics measured from sensors are used as initial conditions in the HNN. A key benefit of the HNN is that this novel neural network is inherently able to define a threshold value in such a way that any deviation from this value is indicative of damage occurrence. The accuracy and performance of the damage detection problems by the HNN is experimentally verified by the I40 Bridge. Results show that the proposed method is potentially able to detect damage and estimate the damage severity based on the outputs of the HNN.

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