Prediction of multiple transverse cracks in a composite beam using hybrid RNN-mPSO technique

Abstract

The presence of faults is common in engineering composite structures. Precise detection of faults prior to failure has been the focal point for researchers working in this domain. Detection of damage from the modal characteristics is an age-old promising technique besides the artificial intelligence techniques such as neural network (NN), Artificial neural network (ANN), recurrent neural network (RNN), and particle swarm optimization (PSO) methods. However, multiple detection techniques combined can give better results. In this regard, recurrent neural networks (RNN) and modified particle swarm optimization (mPSO) are combined to detect damages in a glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) composite cantilever beam. The proposed hybrid model consists of two stages; indices of relative natural frequencies applied to locate crack parameters (position and severity) by recurrent neural network technique and optimization of the results (position and severity) by mPSO. The results illustrate this method can be implemented to predict multiple transverse cracks and their parameters in a composite beam, manifested in the change of natural frequencies where the error is limited to 0.97% only.