An efficient method for structural damage detection using a differential evolution algorithm-based optimisation approach

An efficient method employing the differential evolution algorithm (DEA) as an optimisation solver is presented here to identify the multiple damage cases of structural systems. Natural frequency changes of a structure are considered as a criterion for damage occurrence. The structural damage detection problem is first transformed into a standard optimisation problem dealing with continuous variables, and then the DEA is utilised to solve the optimisation problem for finding the site and extent of structural damage. In order to assess the performance of the proposed method for structural damage identification, some illustrative examples are numerically tested, considering also measurement noise. All the numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for accurately determining the site and extent of multiple-structural damage. Also, the performance of the DEA for damage detection compared to the standard particle swarm optimisation is confirmed by a test example.