Vibration‐based damage detection in a beam structure with multiple damage locations

Abstract During the last two decades structural damage identification using dynamic parameters of the structure has become an important research area for civil, mechanical, and aerospace engineering communities. The basic idea of the vibration‐based damage detection methods is that a damage as a combination of different failure modes in the form of loss of local stiffness in the structure alters its dynamic characteristics, i.e., the modal frequencies, mode shapes, and modal damping values. A great variety of methods have been proposed for damage detection by using dynamic structure parameters; however, most of them require modal data of the healthy state of structure as a reference. In this paper a vibration‐based damage detection method, which uses the mode shape information determined from only the damaged state of the structure is proposed. To establish the method, two aluminium beams containing different sizes of mill‐cut damage at a single location as well as two aluminium beams containing different...