Debonding detection of honeycomb sandwich structures using frequency response functions

Abstract A vibration-based non-destructive evaluation (NDE) method is proposed to determine the location and size of debonding in honeycomb sandwich beams. Although most of the existing vibration-based NDE methods need many measurement points, the method proposed here only utilizes the frequency response function (FRF) measured at one point. A parameterized damaged Timoshenko beam model is developed with the method of reverberation-ray matrix (MRRM) for the first time, and combined with the genetic algorithm (GA) to inverse the damage parameters from the measured FRF. The detection of a honeycomb sandwich beam can be divided into two steps: (1) identifying the equivalent elastic moduli and other parameters of the intact sandwich beam. (2) Identifying the debonding location and size of the damaged sandwich beam with the predetermined parameters. It is demonstrated experimentally that the method can inverse damage parameters with acceptable precision.