Identificação de danos estruturais utilizando técnicas de otimização.

Abstract

Structural systems in a variety of applications including aerospace vehicles, automobiles and civil engineering structures such as tall buildings, bridges and offshore platforms, accumulate damage during their service life. In several situations, such damage may not be visually observable. From the standpoint of both safety and performance, it is desirable to monitor the occurrence, location and extent of such damage.System identification methods, which may be classified in a general category of nondestructive evaluation techniques, can be employed for this purpose. Using experimental data, such as eigenmodes, eigenvectors and static displacements, and an analytical structural model, parameters of the structures can be identified. The approach used in the present work is one where the structural properties of the analytical model are varied to minimize the difference between the analytically predicted and empirically measured response. This is an inverse problem where the structural parameters are identified. In this work a reduced number of vibration modes were used as the measured response. For the damage assessment problem a close analytical model of the structural system is available and the model of the damaged structure will be identified. Damage will be represented by a reduction in the elastic stiffness properties of the structure.The problem described above was solved using global methods of optimization due to the fact that depending on the number of variables or the location of damage the resulting design space is nonconvex presenting several local minima. In the present work, the Differential Evolution Optimization Technique (DE) was used. It is a metaheuristic inspired by a population of solutions that is successively updated by arithmetic operations such as mutation and recombination, until convergence. The approach was applied to simple truss structures with different levels of damage.