Particle swarm optimization–based characterization technique of nonproportional viscous damping parameter of a cantilever beam

Abstract

A complex eigenvector is a result of nonproportional damping present in a structural system. However, it is difficult to identify the accurate damping matrix considering the modal sparsity and coordinate sparsity. A nonproportional viscous damping parameter identification is formulated as an unconstrained optimization problem in the present study. The damping coefficient of each element is considered as the design variable for the optimization problem. The objective function is defined using the incomplete complex eigenvectors, which are generated because of the presence of external damping devices in the structure. This objective function is then minimized using standard particle swarm optimization to identify the damping coefficient of the damping matrix. The accuracy and efficiency of the particle swarm optimization are investigated by solving a few numerical problems with simulated measured data. The proposed method works well with the incomplete measured modal data. The current methodology performs satisfactorily with and without noisy data. A comparison study is performed with the existing gradient-based method, and the results show that the proposed method performs better than the existing gradient-based method for the present problem with and without noisy measurement data.