A Kriging Approach to Model Updating for Damage Detection

For complex or large structures, the model updating process can be long and tedious and numerical methods can be computationally expensive. Hence, practitioners and researchers often resort to meta-modelling techniques when large problems are met. Even so, traditional methodologies, such as the Efficient Global Optimisation, can be slow and give sub-optimal results. This work proposes a new methodology for the model updating of numerical systems based on a novel Kriging approach for the scope of damage detection and quantification. The framework proposed is based on a global-local optimisation strategy recently developed by the authors, the refined Efficient Global Optimisation, herein used to tweak finite element models’ parameters to match the modal data extracted from a numerical system by using the residuals of the modified total modal assurance criterion. The main advantage to existing direct optimisation and meta-modelling frameworks is the more efficient use of computational effort for higher dimensional problems, which is verified with the use of a numerical system.