• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.97-116
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• 2024

The standard l₁-norm regularization is recently introduced for impact force identification, but generally underestimates the peak force. Compared to l₁-norm regularization, l_p-norm (0 ≤ p < 1) regularization, with a nonconvex penalty function, has some promising properties such as enforcing sparsity. In the framework of sparse regularization, if the desired solution is sparse in the time domain or other domains, the under-determined problem with fewer measurements than candidate excitations may obtain the unique solution, i.e., the sparsest solution. Considering the joint sparse structure of impact force in temporal and spatial domains, we propose a general l_p-norm (0 ≤ p < 1) regularization methodology for simultaneous identification of the impact location and force time-history from highly incomplete measurements. Firstly, a nonconvex optimization model based on l_p-norm penalty is developed for regularizing the highly under-determined problem of impact force identification. Secondly, an iteratively reweighed l₁-norm algorithm is introduced to solve such an under-determined and unconditioned regularization model through transforming it into a series of l₁-norm regularization problems. Finally, numerical simulation and experimental validation including single-source and two-source cases of impact force identification are conducted on plate structures to evaluate the performance of l_p-norm (0 ≤ p < 1) regularization. Both numerical and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed l_p-norm regularization method, merely using a single accelerometer, can locate the actual impacts from nine fixed candidate sources and simultaneously reconstruct the impact force time-history; compared to the state-of-the-art l₁-norm regularization, l_p-norm (0 ≤ p < 1) regularization procures sufficiently sparse and more accurate estimates; although the peak relative error of the identified impact force using l_p-norm regularization has a decreasing tendency as p is approaching 0, the results of l_p-norm regularization with 0 ≤ p ≤ 1/2 have no significant differences.