Identification of thin elastic isotropic plate parameters applying Guided Wave Measurement and Artificial Neural Networks

A new hybrid computational system for material identification (HCSMI) is presented, developed for the identification of homogeneous, elastic, isotropic plate parameters. Attention is focused on the construction of dispersion curves, related to Lamb waves. The main idea of the system HCSMI lies in separation of two essential basic computational stages, corresponding to direct or inverse analyses. In the frame of the first stage an experimental dispersion curve DCexp is constructed, applying Guided Wave Measurement (GWM) technique. Then, in the other stage, corresponding to the inverse analysis, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is trained 'off line'. The substitution of results of the first stage, treated as inputs of the ANN, gives the values of identified plate parameters. In such a way no iteration is needed, unlike to the classical approach. In such an approach, the distance between the approximate experimental curves DCexp and dispersion curves DCnum obtained in the direct analysis, is iteratively minimized. Two case studies are presented, corresponding either to measurements in laboratory tests or those related to pseudo-experimental noisy data of computer simulations. The obtained results prove high numerical efficiency of HCSMI, applied to the identification of aluminum plate parameters. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.