Numerical and Experimental Analysis of Cracked Cantilever Beam under Free Vibration

The topic of this work is to discover the variations of depth, shapes and locations of the crack on the natural frequency of cantilever circler shaft. Thirty-two cracked Aluminium shafts have 25 mm diameter and 45 mm length were experimentally tested with 1,2,4,5 mm crack depths and different positions on the beam were applied. Three different finite element models, using ANSYS – APDL (17.2) were built to simulate the crack in the cantilever shaft. The results showed that increasing the depth of crack reduces the frequency of shaft for same mode number. While, at the small crack depth, there is no influence of crack position on the first and second modes of frequencies.