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Summary Because damage identification results based on the Lamb waves propagation approach can be influenced by varying environmental and operational conditions, development of a robust monitoring system with no need of the prior measured data of the structure has gained much attention recently. The instantaneous baseline damage detection technique is one of the promising methods that overcome the mentioned obstacles. For this, the material properties, electromechanical characteristics, and the geometric features must be identical. Also, sensor distances in similar paths and the geometric dimensions of the transducers must be the same. So, implementing the instantaneous baseline damage identification in complex structures is rather complicated due to the inherent non‐homogeneities involved. To ease the complexity, this article proposes a semi‐instantaneous baseline damage identification approach by modifying an existing instantaneous baseline method. This is used to detect and characterize fatigue cracks that initiate around the rivet holes of lap joint structures. In this method, an active sensing network is mounted on the lap joint, and a robust and effective feature called energy ratio change is extracted from the collected time‐domain signals using the wavelet transform. The introduced “identicality coefficient” for all the sensing paths in pristine condition of the structure is obtained and used to remove any inequalities that may occur to the signals of each path. The obtained results show that the proposed method can detect fatigue cracks around the lap joint rivet holes and estimate the crack size. An experiment as well as numerical simulations is performed to verify the method.

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