On the Problem for Damage Detection of Vibrating Cracked Plates

Abstract

This work was motivated by the recent NATO funded research on preventing disasters from collapse and improving the safety of aircraft structures. It considers the problem for vibrationbased damage detection in aircraft panels modelled as isotropic plates. The explored method does not use any assumptions of model or linearity, it is simply based on pure signal analysis of the vibration response of plates. FE modelling is used to model the plate’s dynamic response in its intact and in its damaged state. The signals obtained are analysed using multivariate analysis applied in the measured frequency domain. This reduces the data dimensionality and is expected to have a clustering effect. At this stage the measured data is transformed into features – new variables- which have smaller dimension than the initial ones and make the categories more distinguishable. Then a very simple pattern recognition (PR) method is applied to discriminate between the two categories of data -data coming from the undamaged plate and data coming from the damaged plate. This is the second stage when the obtained features are used for the actual recognition between the defined categories. The paper suggests the use of the Karhunen-Loeve transform in order to extract features from the measured frequency response functions of the plate. When the data dimensionality is brought down to two the response of the plate can be visualised. The clustering effect on the features coming from undamaged plate and those from the damaged is obvious.