Damage identification in plates using vibratory power estimated from measured accelerations

Abstract Vibratory power is defined as the rate of energy transmitted through a cross section of unit width in a vibrating structure. It is known that the vibratory power is a function of the source and travel path. Therefore the spatial distribution of the vibratory power may contain information on the state of a structure. Vibratory power can be estimated experimentally by measuring accelerations. By combining numerical predictions with experimental measurements the location and severity of damage can be identified. This method has been successfully applied to prismatic beam problems. In the present work, the idea is extended to identifying damage in thin plate problems. To identify damage in thin plates by the proposed vibratory power method, the two-dimensional damage index and damage index ratio are newly introduced. The plate is assumed to be of uniform thickness and damaged in the form of a crack simulated as a straight cut of finite length. The vibratory power of the plate is estimated from frequency response functions to random excitations. First, the proposed method is applied numerically and then verified experimentally. Both numerical and experimental results show the present method can identify not only the location of damage but also its direction. The location and direction can be identified by investigating the damage index, the damage index ratio, and local principal axes of the index peak in the vicinity of the damage. The spatial distribution of the damage index, newly introduced in beam problems, can be considered as a scalar field in plate problems. In the neighborhood of the damage, the damage index has the shape of a semi-ellipsoid or a semi-ovoid, and it is found that the major principal axis corresponds to the direction of the crack. It enables us to identify the damage direction correctly without ambiguity.