Estimation of the severity of damage produced by a transverse crack

Abstract

This paper presents a method to find the severity of a crack for cantilever beams that can be used to estimate the frequency drop due to the crack. The severity is found for the crack located at the location where the biggest curvature (or bending moment) is achieved. Because the fixing condition does not permit a symmetrical deformation around the crack, the apparent severity is smaller as the real one. The latter is found by the estimated value of the trend-line at the fixed end, it being constructed on points that consider the crack position (equidistant points in the proximity of the fixed end) and the resulted deflections.

Keywords

• cantilever beam
• transverse crack
• damage severity
• deflection
• statistical method