System identification of a composite plate using hybrid response surface methodology and particle swarm optimization in time domain

Material properties of composites are identified using a novel hybrid RSM–PSO method in this paper. Different response surface methodology (RSM) methods and particle swarm optimization (PSO) methods are studied initially on a 4 degrees-of-freedom (4DOF) dynamic system on their performance in terms of speed and accuracy. The best combination is used as a hybrid RSM–PSO method to evaluate the performance on system identification of an orthotropic plate along with a 4DOF dynamic system and an isotropic plate. The novelty of the present paper is to identify the composite plate material properties using RSM methods based on time domain signals, which is not hitherto reported in the literature. Also, whereas previous papers have used full factorial design for system identification, here CCDI is used. The input factors (design variables) are the system parameters which are to be identified and the response (objective function) is error sum-of-square of acceleration response with respect to new test system. The performance of the proposed method is also evaluated with the addition of 5% Gaussian noise to simulate the experimental errors. The system parameters of the orthotropic plate were identified with 0% and 0.25% average prediction error with zero and 5% addition of noise respectively by the proposed hybrid RSM–PSO method. It is also showed a much better performance and robustness to noise addition when compared to the other RSM methods in the literature.