eng Science and Education Publishing Journal of Mechanical Design and Vibration 2014-11-20 2 4 87 93 10.12691/jmdv-2-4-3 JMDV2014243 article Mangesh Dilip Ratolikar mangesh.ratolikar@gmail.com 1 M Chandra Sekhar Reddy 1 Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering, Osmania University, Hyderabad, India In this paper, investigations on vibrations of cracked beam structures and methodology for crack identification have been addressed. Here, the crack is modelled as transverse crack and it is considered as a small element and is later assembled with the other discretized elements using FEM techniques. Using this model, vibration analysis of simply supported, fixed-fixed, free-free and cantilever solid rectangular beams, with crack is carried out. The fundamental vibration modes of damaged beam are analyzed using Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT). The location of crack is determined by the sudden changes in the spatial variation of the transformed response. The results in both the simulation mode as well as experimental mode show that, HHT is an effective tool for the crack detection. The proposed technique is validated both analytically and experimentally thus the results shown have a good agreement with the established model. http://pubs.sciepub.com/jmdv/2/4/3/jmdv-2-4-3.pdf crack detection beam FEM Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) structural health monitoring (SHM)