The application of evolutionary and maximum entropy algorithms to photoelastic spectral analysis

Over the past 10 years, spectral analysis has been shown to have the potent ial to be a reliable means of automating photoelasticity. However, the four methods of analyzing the spectra that have previously been proposed are sl ow and, in some cases, inaccurate. This paper describes three new methods f or spectral analysis based on the maximum entropy method, a genetic algorit hm and a memetic algorithm. Thirty-five spectra for known fringe orders wer e recorded and used in testing the four existing methods and the three new ones. It was found that the new methods were all considerably faster than t he existing methods, although less accurate than the best existing method. By combining the maximum entropy method with either the genetic algorithm o r the memetic algorithm, spectra could be analyzed up to 30 times as fast a s they could with any of the existing methods and with comparable accuracy.