A fast impact force identification method via constructing a dynamic reduced dictionary

Impact force identification is an important aspect of structural health monitoring for online assessment of the integrity of engineering structures. Increasing the number of monitoring positions is undoubtedly beneficial to accurate force localization, however, it may increase sharply the dimension of the transfer matrix and thus lead to a large-scale inverse problem. In this case, traditional methods, such as the Iterative Shrinkage Threshold algorithm (IST) and the Two-Step Iterative Shrinkage Thresholding algorithm (TwIST), suffer from low solving efficiency. In this paper, the dynamic reduced dictionary is firstly introduced according to the sparsity of impact force in both time and spatial domains so as to lower significantly the dimension of the transfer matrix. Then, a new reduced unconstrained optimization problem is established via the dynamic reduced dictionary for impact force identification. By integrating the reduced unconstrained optimization problem into each iteration step of IST/TwIST, two novel algorithms, which are the reduced Newton iteration shrinkage threshold algorithm (rNIST) and the reduced Newton two-step iteration shrinkage threshold algorithm (rNTwIST), are proposed to solve quickly the large-scale impact force identification problem using ℓ₁-norm sparse regularization. Meanwhile, the adaptive setting of regularization parameters strategy is used to construct force more fast and accurately. The proposed algorithms are numerically and experimentally demonstrated through identifying impact forces at 16-point and 81-point distributions of a plate using one sensor response. The results show that rNIST/rNTwIST can more quickly and accurately identify impact forces under numerous monitoring points compared with other ℓ₁-norm regularization methods and nonconvex sparse regularization methods. Moreover, the more the number of monitoring points, the more obvious the efficiency improvement of the impact force identification by rNIST/rNTwIST method.