Multiple damages detection in beam based approximate waveform capacity dimension

A number of mode shape-based structure damage identification methods have been verified by numerical simulations or experiments for on-line structure health monitoring (SHM). However, many of them need a baseline mode shape generated by the healthy structure serving as a reference to identify damages. Otherwise these methods can hardly perform well when multiple cracks conditions occur. So it is important to solve the problems above. By aid of the fractal dimension method (FD), Qiao and Wang proposed a generalized fractal dimension (GFD) to detect the delamination damage. As a modification of GFD, Qiao and Cao proposed the approximate waveform capacity dimension (AWCD) technique to simplify the calculation of fractal and overcome the false peak appearing in the high mode shapes. Based on their valued work, this paper combined and applied the AWCD method and curvature mode shape data to detect multiple damages in beam. In the end, the identification properties of the AWCD for multiple damages have been verified by groups of Monte Carlo simulations and experiments.