Crack identification using hybrid neuro-genetic technique

It has been established that a crack has an important effect on the dynamic behavior of a structure. This effect depends mainly on the location and de pth of the crack. To identify the location and depth of a crack on a struct ure, a method is presented in this paper which uses hybrid neuro-genetic te chnique. Feed-forward multi-layer neural networks trained by back-propagati on are used to learn the input (the location and depth of a crack)-output ( the structural eigenfrequencies) relation of the structural system. With th is trained neural network, genetic algorithm is used to identify the crack location and depth minimizing the difference from the measured frequencies. (C) 2000 Academic Press.