Abstract
Recently, assessing the integrity of the civil or mechanical structures has been extremely important in order to ensure safety. In general, damage localization is performed through comparisons of some feature which robustly quantifies damage-induced changes, which implies that some baseline data needs to be possessed under the intact condition of the structure in advance.However, there aremany existing structureswhich have no such baseline data. In this study, an attempt is made to develop a baseline-free damage detection system using digital image correlation method and fractal dimension analysis. The numerical and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system can make it possible to detect damage location without using any baseline data by evaluating breakpoints of fundamental vibrationmode.
