Method for identifying the impact load condition of thin-walled structure damage based on PSO-BP neural network

Thin-walled structures (TWS) were widely used in engineering equipment, and may be subjected to impact loads to produce different degrees of structural damage during application. However, it is a difficult problem to determine the impact load conditions for these structural damages. In this study, we developed a novel method of identifying the impact load condition of the thin-walled structure damage, which is based on particle swarm optimization-backpropagation (PSO-BP) neural network. First, the known impact position and velocity are applied to the finite element model (FEM) of the TWS to produce permanent plastic deformation, and to fit the characteristic shape of the deformation is needed by invoking the multivariate polynomial function. Then, the method is devoted to build a basic data set. With impact position and velocity as input and function coefficients as output, a model of extended PSO-BP neural network is established. Besides, the basic sample set is expanded to solve the lack of samples. Ultimately, utilizing the expanded total sample set as training data, function coefficients, impact position and velocity will be outputted. On the basis of the known functional coefficients of deformed surfaces, a model of predictive PSO-BP neural network is established and predicted. Furthermore, we predicted the collision position and velocity using a conventional BP neural network in the same way. Finally, the predicted impact position and velocity is compared with the analysis results of the FEM, which verifies that the PSO-BP neural network algorithm has high accuracy.