Damage is an ordinary physical phenomenon jeopardizing structural safety; damage detection is an ongoing interdisciplinary issue. Waveform fractal theory has provided a promising resource for detecting damage in plates while presenting a concomitant problem: susceptibility to false features of damage. This study proposes a fractal dimension method based on affine transformation to address this problem. Physical experiments using laser measurement demonstrate that this method can substantially eliminate false features of damage and accurately identify complex cracks in plates, providing a fundamental mechanism that brings the merits of waveform fractal theory into full play in structural damage detection applications.

DOI: 10.1063/1.4833837