Damage Identification in Frame Structure Based on Inverse Analysis

Abstract

Structural damage is a challenging issue in civil and mechanical engineering. Researchers developed several approaches to address it thought out the last few decades, which are also known as large development of metaheuristic algorithms. Their ability to overcome local minima very well compared to local search algorithms helped the raise of damage identification approaches based on the inverse problems. Allowing us to tackle more complex structures and damage parameters like the location and severity. This paper investigates the performance of the of Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) technique for model updating and damage identification, by solving an inverse problem to calibrate a Finite Element model of frame structure based on measurements. The performance of WOA is compared to the Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) from the literature. This study considers an objective function that is based on vibrational frequency, comparing the experimentaly measured and calculated frequencies. To challenge the effectiveness of this application, two cases based on single and multiple damages are presented. The results show that better accuracy is obtained using WOA than Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The obtained results clearly indicate that the proposed technique can be used to estimate accurately and efficiently both damage location and severity in frame structures.