Transient response of a damaged continuous beam

While elastic waves propagates along structures, all kinds of information can be carried, in-cluding damage information, which offers possibility for detection of damaged structures. For the sake of carrying on local control and health safety monitoring, a damaged continuous beam by applying square pulses was investigated by the reverberation-ray matrix method. The local damage in the continuous beam was modeled by the decreased Youngs modulus. Researched results show that while the square pulse is applied obliquely, the axial velocity wave at the receiving point can be detected, the detected velocity wave can be used to locate the damage position and to estimate the damage degree.