Input forces estimation of beam structures by an inverse method

An on-line recursive inverse method to estimate the input forces of beam structures is presented. The inverse method is based on the Kalman filter and a recursive least-squares algorithm. The filter models the system dynamics in a linear set of state equations. The state equations of the beam structures were constructed using the finite element method. The practicability and accuracy of the estimation method were examined with numerical simulations from which the input forces of a cantilever beam with a lumped mass on the free end were estimated from the output responses. In the numerical experiments, the cantilever beam was subjected to five types of input forces, i.e., sinusoidal, triangular impulse, rectangular impulse, a series of impulses and random. The simulation results show that the inverse method has an excellent performance to estimate the input forces of beam structural systems from the noisy measurements. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.