Damage monitoring in sandwich beams by modal parameter shifts: A comparative study of burst random and sine dwell vibration testing

This paper presents an experimental study on the effects of multi-site damage on the vibration response of honeycomb sandwich beams, damaged by two different ways i.e., impact damage and core-only damage simulating damage due to bird or stone impact or due to mishandling during assembly and maintenance. The variation of the modal parameters with different levels of impact energy and density of damage is studied. Vibration tests have been carried out with both burst random and sine dwell testing in order to evaluate the damping estimation efficiency of these methods in the presence of damage. Sine dwell testing is done in both up and down frequency directions in order to detect structural non-linearities. Results show that damping ratio is a more sensitive parameter for damage detection than the natural frequency. Design of experiments (DOE) highlighted density of damage as the factor having a more significant effect on the modal parameters and also proved that sine dwell testing is more suitable for damping estimation in the presence of damage as compared to burst random testing. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.