Research on Damage Identification of Nonuniform Microcrack in Beam Structures

Abstract

Nonuniform microcrack identification is of great significance in mechanical, aerospace, and civil engineering. In this study, the nonuniform crack is simplified as a semielliptical crack, and simplified calculation methods are proposed for damage severity and damage identification of semielliptical cracks. The proposed methods are based on the calculation method for uniform cracks. The wavelet transform and the intelligent algorithm (IA) are used to identify the damage location and the damage severity of the structure, respectively. The singularity of the wavelet coefficient can be used to identify the signal singularity quickly and accurately, and IA efficiently and accurately calculates the structural damage severity. The particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and the genetic algorithm (GA), widely used, are applied to identify the damage severity of the beam. Numerical simulations and experimental analyses of beams with transfixion and semielliptical cracks are carried out to evaluate the accuracy of the semielliptical crack calculation method and the method of wavelet analysis combined with PSO and GA for nonuniform crack identification. The results show that the wavelet-particle swarm optimization (WPSO) and the wavelet-genetic algorithm (WGA) can accurately and efficiently identify the structural semielliptical damage location and severity and that these methods are not easily influenced by noise. The damage severity calculation method for semielliptical cracks can accurately calculate the semielliptical size and can be used to identify damage in beams with semielliptical cracks.