Vibration Based Damage Detection in a Uniform Strength Beam Using Genetic Algorithm

Abstract

Abstract Cantilever steel beams of uniform strength are having various industrial applications. In particular when it is used as leaf spring it undergoes very large deflection in comparison to beam of uniform cross section. The damage occurs in these beams mainly due to fatigue loading. Early detection of damage in such type of beams is very essential to avoid a ma-jor failure or accident. In this paper, firstly formula-tion of an objective function for the genetic search optimization procedure along with the residual force method are presented for the identification of macro-scopic structural damage in an uniform strength beam. Two cases have been investigated here. In the first case the width is varied keeping the strength of beam uni-form throughout and in the second case both width an