Crack identification method for tapered cantilever pipe-type beam using natural frequencies

A method to detect location and size of a crack in tapered cantilever pipe-type beam using changes in natural frequencies is presented. The boundary conditions of cantilever beam are applied to a general solution for vibrating tapered beam. Then, an equivalent bending stiffness for cracked beam is used to obtain the natural frequencies. Numerical simulations are carried out to construct a set of training patterns of a neural network, and committee of neural networks is employed to identify the crack. Crack identifications are carried out for the 16 damage cases numerically and for the 3 damage cases experimentally. The identified crack locations and sizes agree reasonably well with the exact values.