This work presents an effective method to identify the tip locations of an internal crack in cantilever plates based on a Kriging surrogate model. Samples of varying crack parameters (tip locations) and their corresponding root mean square (RMS) of random responses are used to construct the initial Kriging surrogate model. Moreover, the pseudo excitation method (PEM) is employed to speed up the spectral analysis. For identifying crack parameters based on the constructed Kriging model, a robust stochastic particle swarm optimization (SPSO) algorithm is adopted for enhancing the global searching ability. To improve the accuracy of the surrogate model without using extensive samples, a small number of samples are first used. Then an optimal point-adding process is carried out to reduce computational cost. Numerical studies of a cantilever plate with an internal crack are performed. The effectiveness and efficiency of this method are demonstrated by the identified results. The effect of initial sampling size on the precision of the identified results is also investigated.
Keywords: Kriging model; cantilever plate; crack identification; pseudo excitation method.