Micromechanical damage identification of vibrating laminated composites using bivariate Gaussian function-based genetic algorithms.

This study deals with a micromechanical detection of stiffness degradation occurred by the fiber damage in vibrating laminated composite plates. Five unknown parameters are considered to determine the fiber or matrix damage distribution, which is a modified form of the bivariate Gaussian distribution function. The proposed approach is more feasible than the conventional element-based damage detection method from the computational efficiency because it is independent on the number of divided elements. The micromechanical model is embedded in the reconstruction algorithm using the modified Halpin–Tsai formulation. The numerical examples show that the proposed technique is a feasible and practical method, which can prove the location of a damaged region as well as inspect the distribution of deteriorated stiffness of composites for different fiber angles and layup sequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]