Vibration-based damage growth monitoring in beam-like structures

Damage growth monitoring plays an important role in providing early warning of structural failure. The existing methods for damage growth monitoring are mainly local inspection methods, such as acoustic emission. These methods need a priori knowledge of accessible damage vicinity, which may not be realized in practice. Hence, vibration-based global approach is adopted to overcome these difficulties. Natural frequency, as a global modal parameter, can be measured easily and is used for vibration-based damage growth monitoring in this study. A concept of damage-induced relative natural frequency change (RNFC) curve is defined first and its relation with mode shape is then derived analytically, giving a good way to approximate RNFC curves. For monitoring damage growth, a damage growth indicator is proposed based on RNFCs between two damaged stages of a beam. The effectiveness of the indicator for damage growth monitoring is proved by both numerical and experimental cases in beam-like structures