Master's thesis of Engineering: Evaluation of damage in structures using vibration-based analyses

The aim of the research was the processing of the vibration signatures from healthy and damaged composite beams acquired with the help of a Scanning Laser Vibrometer (SLV) upon excitation and analysis of the mode shapes acquired for damage detection. The displacement mode shapes acquired were then converted into curvature mode shapes with the help of a Central Difference Approximation method (CDA). A major part of this project was to identify the dynamic responses from composites structures for damage detection, the pattern recognition techniques that could potentially be used to interpret the structural responses, and to determine a means of extracting the size and location of the damage from the responses.