by Bao, Y. G.; Wang, X. D.

The current paper presents a theoretical study of the identification of cracks in an elastic medium based on optimization methods using harmonic elastic waves. A generalized crack model was used to determine the elastodynamic behaviour of an arbitrarily located and oriented crack subjected to a plane harmonic wave. Sensitivity analysis was conduced to evaluate the variation of stress and strain fields with various crack parameters using the direct differential method (DDM). These general results were then used to identify an unknown crack from known strain components at discrete locations. The BFGS optimization scheme based on the sensitivity analysis was used to determine the length, the orientation and the position of the crack. Numerical simulation was conducted and the results were presented to show the effectiveness of the sensitivity analysis and the optimization method. It was observed that starting from a set of arbitrarily determined initial values, the length, position and the orientation of the crack can be accurately determined.

DOI: 10.1007/s10704-009-9394-8
Online Date: 9/30/2009
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