A Robust FRF-based Technique for Model Updating

Frequency Response Functions (FRFs) residues have been widely used in time to update Finite Element models. Major reasons for this is that FRFs are very sensitive to damping properties at resonance peaks, local modes influence is included and no modal analysis is required. Nevertheless, it is well known that due to their nature, the frequency responses may change its order of magnitude very rapidly for small parameter or frequency changes. This situation may cause serious discontinuities in the topology of the objective function, causing the updating strategy to diverge or to find a local non-physical minimum. A primary tool for the correlation of FRFs is the Frequency Domain Assurance Criterion. This technique introduces the concept of frequency shift between the frequency response shapes of a reference model (the experimental structure) and a perturbed model (an initial non-updated FE model). Such a concept opens the way for using residues at different frequencies. For instance, in reference the residue is composed by point FRFs at anti-resonances. This paper introduces a general FRF-based model-updating technique, which is focused in using stable residues during the interactive optimization procedure. A benchmark case from the Cost F3 action is used to assess the goodness of the method compared to other well known methods.