Non-convex sparse optimization-based impact force identification with limited vibration measurements

Impact force identification is important for structure health monitoring especially in applications involving composite structures. Different from the traditional direct measurement method, the impact force identification technique is more cost effective and feasible because it only requires a few sensors to capture the system response and infer the information about the applied forces. This technique enables the acquisition of impact locations and time histories of forces, aiding in the rapid assessment of potentially damaged areas and the extent of the damage. As a typical inverse problem, impact force reconstruction and localization is a challenging task, which has led to the development of numerous methods aimed at obtaining stable solutions. The classical ℓ 2 regularization method often struggles to generate sparse solutions. When solving the under-determined problem, ℓ 2 regularization often identifies false forces in non-loaded regions, interfering with the accurate identification of the true impact locations. The popular ℓ 1 sparse regularization, while promoting sparsity, underestimates the amplitude of impact forces, resulting in biased estimations. To alleviate such limitations, a novel non-convex sparse regularization method that uses the non-convex ℓ 1–2 penalty, which is the difference of the ℓ 1 and ℓ 2 norms, as a regularizer, is proposed in this paper. The principle of alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is introduced to tackle the non-convex model by facilitating the decomposition of the complex original problem into easily solvable subproblems. The proposed method named ℓ 1–2 -ADMM is applied to solve the impact force identification problem with unknown force locations, which can realize simultaneous impact localization and time history reconstruction with an under-determined, sparse sensor configuration. Simulations and experiments are performed on a composite plate to verify the identification accuracy and robustness with respect to the noise of the ℓ 1−2 -ADMM method. Results indicate that compared with other existing regularization methods, the ℓ 1–2 -ADMM method can simultaneously reconstruct and localize impact forces more accurately, facilitating sparser solutions, and yielding more accurate results.