A genetic algorithm applied to composite elastic parameters identification

The aim of this work is to present a technique to identify elastic parameters of composite materials. The identification is based on model updating involving an optimization process in which the objective function is defined as the difference between analytical natural frequencies and their experimental counterparts. Such analytical natural frequencies are obtained by means of the finite element method while the experimental ones are obtained by standard modal tests. The optimization problem is solved by a genetic algorithm (GA), which does not require the cost function gradient avoiding the expensive eigenvectors computation presents in gradient methods. The proposed technique is assessed by a number of different tests.