Crack identification in post-buckled beam-type structures

This study investigates the problem of crack detection in post-buckled beam-type structures. The beam under the axial compressive force has a crack, assumed to be open and through the width. The crack, which is modeled by a massless rotational spring, divides the beam into two segments. The crack detection is considered as an optimization problem, and the weighted sum of the squared errors between the measured and computed natural frequencies is minimized by the bees algorithm. To find the natural frequencies, the governing nonlinear equations of motion for the post-buckled state are first derived. The solution of the nonlinear differential equations of the two segments consists of static and dynamic parts. The differential quadrature method along with an arc length strategy is used to solve the static part, while the same method is utilized for the solution of the linearized dynamic part and the extraction of the natural frequencies of the cracked beam. The investigation includes several numerical as well as experimental case studies on the post-buckled simply supported and clamped-clamped beams having open cracks. The results show that several parameters such as the amount of applied compressive force and boundary conditions influences the outcome of the crack detection scheme. The identification results also show that the crack position and depth can be predicted well by the presented method.