A two-stage assessment method using damage locating vector method and differential evolution algorithm for damage identification of cross-ply laminated composite beams

Abstract

This article proposes a two-stage damage identification method to identify the location and extent of multiple damages at individual layers in laminated composite beams. In the first stage, the damage locating vector method using normalized cumulative energy is employed to detect the locations of suspected damaged elements. In the second stage, the degree of the suspected damaged elements is determined by solving an optimization problem via differential evolution algorithm. To identify damage at a specific layer of the laminated composite beams, the layerwise theory is applied to analysis behavior of the beams. The performance of the method is assessed through two numerical examples with different damage scenarios. In addition, the effect of noise on the damage identification results is investigated.