Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 607418, 11 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/607418
Research Article

A Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)-Simplex Algorithm for Damage Identification of Delaminated Beams

1Department of Engineering Mechanics, Hohai University, Nanjing 210098, China
2Institute of Fluid Flow Machinery, Polish Academy of Sciences, 80-952 Gdansk, Poland
3Department of Mechanical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Hong Kong

Received 5 May 2012; Revised 24 July 2012; Accepted 29 July 2012

Academic Editor: Alessandro Marzani

Copyright © 2012 Xiangdong Qian et al. 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.

Abstract

Delamination is a type of representative damage in composite structures, severely degrading structural integrity and reliability. The identification of delamination is commonly treated as an issue of nondestructive testing. Differing from existing studies, a hybrid optimization algorithm (HOA), combining particle swarm optimization (PSO) with simplex method (SM), is proposed to identify delamination in laminated beams. The objective function of the optimization problem is created using delamination variables (optimization parameters) together with actually measured modal frequencies. The HOA adopts a hierarchical and cooperative regime of global search and local search to optimize the objective function. The PSO performs global search for objective function space to achieve a preliminary solution specifying a local potential space. Initialized by this preliminary solution, the SM executes local search for the local potential space to explore the optimal solution. The HOA is validated by a series of simulated delamination scenarios, and the results show that it can identify delamination in laminated beams with decent accuracy, reliability and efficiency. The method proposed holds promise for establishing online damage detection system beneficial for health monitoring of laminated composite structures.