Abstract
Non-homogeneous structural members such as beams are very important in various engineering applications and for experimental analysis purposes. A minor damage on any part of the structure reduces the strength of the structure and leads to a major failure. The analysis of non-homogenous beam becomes complicated due to the change of material properties from point to point. However, it becomes much more complicated when there exists a taper on such type of beams. In this paper, a new formulation of an objective function for the genetic search optimization procedure along with the residual force method is presented for the identification of macroscopic structural damage in a non-homogeneous tapered beam. The developed model requires experimentally determined data as input and detects the location and extent of the damage in the beam. Here, numerically simulated data using finite element models of structures are used to identify the damage at a reasonable level of accuracy. Damage parameters given theoretically are compared by the present procedure and are found to be in good agreement.