Inverse Load Identification in Stiffened Plate Structure Based on in situ Strain Measurement

For practical engineering structures, it is usually difficult to measure external load distribution in a direct manner, which makes inverse load identification important. Specifically, load identification is a typical inverse problem, for which the models (e.g., response matrix) are often ill-posed, resulting in degraded accuracy and impaired noise immunity of load identification. This study aims at identifying external loads in a stiffened plate structure, through comparing the effectiveness of different methods for parameter selection in regulation problems, including the Generalized Cross Validation (GCV) method, the Ordinary Cross Validation method and the truncated singular value decomposition method. With demonstrated high accuracy, the GCV method is used to identify concentrated loads in three different directions (e.g., vertical, lateral and longitudinal) exerted on a stiffened plate. The results show that the GCV method is able to effectively identify multi-source static loads, with relative errors less than 5%. Moreover, under the situation of swept frequency excitation, when the excitation frequency is near the natural frequency of the structure, the GCV method can achieve much higher accuracy compared with direct inversion. At other excitation frequencies, the average recognition error of the GCV method load identification less than 10%.