Maximum likelihood estimation of probabilistically described loads in beam structures

Abstract

In recent years, focus has been shifted towards predictive maintenance in an effort to improve the reliability of operating structures. Processing structural response data obtained from in-situ sensors during operation can provide added value towards this direction. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) methods are uniquely suited for this task; however, accounting for the effect of stochastic structural loads is critical for their robustness. In this work, a framework based on Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) is presented, whose goal is to obtain inferences on typically unobservable quantities that describe stochastic structural loading. A structural beam is employed as a demonstrative case study, that is subjected to point loads with stochastic magnitude and application points. The hyperparameters that govern their underlying probability distribution functions (pdf) are the quantities of inferential interest. The inverse (load) identification process is performed using a marginalized MLE objective, where stochastic Monte Carlo (MC) integration is employed to perform the marginalization and Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are used as the optimizer. The Cramer–Rao (CR) lower bound is used to produce 95 % Confidence Intervals (CIs) to quantify estimation uncertainty.