Assessment of severity and localisation of a transversal crack in a wood beam through a study of its natural modes of vibration

This work is concerned with the study of severity and location of a transverse crack in a wood beam. There exist several ways of solving this problem, including both analytical and numerical approaches. However, this study takes into consideration simple, but efficient analytical approaches to study the case of a simply supported beam subject to a crack. The investigation concerns monitoring the variation of eigenfrequencies with crack depth for the few lowest modes of vibration, and vibrations both in the longitudinal and the bending modes are taken into consideration. Experimental results are also reported for supporting the theoretical predictions.