Damage detection of cracked beams based on wavelet transform

In this paper, a damage detection method based on a continuous wavelet transform is proposed and applied to analyze flexural wave in a cracked beam. For flexural waves obtained from FEM or experiments, some useful characters of the incident, reflected and transmitted waves at a certain frequency can be extracted by the Gabor wavelet to exactly identify the damage location and its extent. The orientation of an inclined crack is also discussed in the paper.