Free vibration analysis of a cantilever beam with a slant edge crack

As one of major failure modes of mechanical structures subjected to periodic loads, edge cracks due to fatigue can cause catastrophic failures in such structures. Understanding vibration characteristics of a structure with an edge crack is useful for early crack detection and diagnosis. In this work, a new cracked cantilever beam model is presented to study the vibration of a cantilever beam with a slant edge crack, which cannot be modeled by previous methods considering a uniform edge crack along the width of the beam in the literature. An equivalent stiffness model is proposed by dividing the beam into numerous uniform independent thin pieces along its width. The beam is assumed to be an Euler–Bernoulli beam. The crack is assumed to be distributed along the width of the beam as a straight line and a parabola. The methodology proposed in this work can also be extended to model a crack with an arbitrary curve. Effects of crack depths on the nondimensional equivalent stiffness at the crack section of the cracked cantilever beam are studied. The first three nature frequencies and mode shapes of the cracked cantilever beam are obtained using compatibility conditions at crack tips and the transfer matrix method. Effects of depths and the location of the crack on the first three natural frequencies and mode shapes of the cracked cantilever beam are studied using the proposed cracked cantilever beam model. Numerical results from the proposed model are compared with those from the finite element method and an experimental investigation in the literature, which can validate the proposed model.