Damage assessment in structures using combination of a modified Cornwell indicator and genetic algorithm

This paper presents a new methodology for damage identification and quantification in two- and three-dimensional structures. The application of the proposed methodology is investigated numerically using Finite Element Method (FEM) and Matlab program. We propose a Modified Cornwell Indicator (MCI) that performs more efficient in damage detection than the standard Cornwell Indicator (CI). Furthermore, MCI is combined with Genetic Algorithm (GA) for further quantification of the detected damage. In GA, MCI, is used as an objective function to compare between measured and calculated indicators. The results of the analysis show that the proposed technique is accurate and efficient, when compared with other techniques in the literature, to estimate the severity of structural damage.