Application of entropy in identification of breathing cracks in a beam structure: Simulations and experimental studies

A cantilever beam with a breathing crack is studied to detect the crack and evaluate the crack depth using entropy measures. During the vibration in engineering structures, fatigue cracks undergo the status from close-to-open (and open-to-close) repetitively leading to a crack breathing phenomenon. Entropy is a measure, which can quantify the complexity or irregularity in system dynamics, and hence employed to quantify the bi-linearity/irregularity of the vibration response, which is induced by the breathing phenomenon of a crack. A mathematical model of harmonically excited unit length steel cantilever beam with a breathing crack located near the fixed end is established, and an iterative numerical method is applied to generate accurate time domain vibration responses. The steady-state time domain vibration signals are pre-processed with wavelet transformation, and the bi-linearity/irregularity of the vibration signals due to breathing effect is then successfully quantified using both sample entropy and quantized approximation of sample entropy to detect and estimate the crack depth. It is observed that the method is capable of identifying crack depths even at very early stages of 3% of the beam thickness with significant increment in the entropy values (more than 200%) compared to the healthy beam. In addition, experimental studies are conducted, and the simulation results are in good agreement with the experimental results. The proposed technique can also be applied to damage identification in other types of structures, such as plates and shells.