A Crack Identification Approach for Beam-Like Structures under Moving Vehicle using Particle Swarm Optimization

Abstract A crack identification method for beam type structures under moving vehicle is proposed. The basic of the method is to formulate damage detection as an inverse problem, and solve for damage locations and extents. With respect to this, an objective function is defined based on the difference of damaged beam dynamic response and the response calculated by the mathematical model of the beam. The optimization problem is solved by the particle swarm optimization (PSO) with linearly increasing inertia weight to obtain crack locations and their depths. By the numerical simulations, it was observed that cracks with depth ratio of 0.1 can be identified with reasonable error by the present method in spite of noise interference of 3 %.