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The field of health monitoring of structures may have possible benefits for many industries. In this work, we analyze damage induced in an automotive exhaust hanger component. Damage in this system is defined as a crack development and propagation at a specific location. It is proposed and demonstrated in this work that a selected group of modal frequencies and their collective behavior is a suitable measure of tracking the damage. It is also shown in this work, via experimental and computational observations, that the second moment of inertia is very sensitive to the damage induced. Future work will include developing a predictive model for damage in this automotive exhaust system component.

Prognosis integrates physics based models of damage, noninvasive real time interrogation techniques and data/signature analysis to predict future performance. One of the significant capabilities essential for the prognosis methodology to work is to develop analysis methods for multiple and interacting damage and failure mechanisms. In this paper the proposed methodology has been demonstrated with the help of a nonlinear multi-degree-of-freedom system which exhibits multiple phenomenological damage phenomenon. It is shown that the participation factors for the bifurcating damage modes can be used to characterize the damage mechanism.