Oboe, D.; Poloni, D.; Sbarufatti, C.; Giglio, M. Towards Automatic Crack Size Estimation with iFEM for Structural Health Monitoring. Sensors2023, 23, 3406.
Oboe, D.; Poloni, D.; Sbarufatti, C.; Giglio, M. Towards Automatic Crack Size Estimation with iFEM for Structural Health Monitoring. Sensors 2023, 23, 3406.
Oboe, D.; Poloni, D.; Sbarufatti, C.; Giglio, M. Towards Automatic Crack Size Estimation with iFEM for Structural Health Monitoring. Sensors2023, 23, 3406.
Oboe, D.; Poloni, D.; Sbarufatti, C.; Giglio, M. Towards Automatic Crack Size Estimation with iFEM for Structural Health Monitoring. Sensors 2023, 23, 3406.
Abstract
The inverse Finite Element Method (iFEM) is a model-based technique to compute the displacement (and then the strain) field of a structure from strain measurements and a geometrical discretization of the same. Different literature works exploit the error between the numerically reconstructed strains and the experimental measurements to perform damage identification in a Structural Health Monitoring framework. However, only damage detection and localization are performed, without attempting a proper damage size estimation. The latter could be based on machine learning techniques, however, an a priori definition of the damage conditions would be required. To overcome these limitations, the present work proposes a new approach in which the damage is systematically introduced in the iFEM model to minimize its discrepancy with respect to the physical structure. This is performed with a maximum likelihood estimation framework, where the most accurate damage scenario is selected among a series of different models. The proposed approach is experimentally verified on an aluminum plate subjected to fatigue crack propagation, which enables the creation of a Digital-Twin of the structure itself. The strain field fed to the iFEM routine is experimentally measured with an Optical Backscatter Reflectometry fiber and the methodology is validated with independent observations of lasers and the Digital Image Correlation.
Keywords
inverse Finite Element Method; iFEM; Digital-Twin; Structural Health Monitoring; crack; Digital Image Correlation
Subject
Engineering, Mechanical Engineering
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
