Structural health monitoring: Frequency domain analysis of beam with breathing crack

Abstract Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) system can be considered as an Internet-of-Things (IoT) system implemented to engineering structure to provide real-time information on the integrity of the structure. In doing so, the system acquires data from various sensors distributed across the structure and infers damage sensitive quantities. In the research, we proposed a damage index derived from the governing dynamics of the structure in the frequency domain. The proposal was empirically verified by applying the index to analyze the case of a cracked cantilever beam subjected to a harmonic load. The value of the damage index was computed at some points surrounding the crack to understand the effect of the distance of the monitoring point to the crack to the index sensitivity. The results suggest that the index is sensitive to the crack particularly when the observation point is near the crack.