Abstract
The estimate load by direct measures for structures that are in actual use is in practice very difficult or even impossible because the impact location is inaccessible, or the projectile is deformable so can not be instrumented. The problem of identifying impact force on mechanical structures is the inverse of the direct problem: the use of measured responses on a given structure to try to identify the causes, i.e. the impact forces that are at the origin.
In this study, we developed an experimental method to identify the impact force on a reinforced concrete slab. A transfer function obtained experimentally between the acceleration response and the force history applied to a point of the structure was used. To regularize the solution obtained with this inverse problem, we used the Tikhonov method. To locate the impact force, we used an experimental method based on the minimization of an objective function created from the transfer functions between several impact locations, forming a mesh structure, and several measuring points. Characterizing the impact means locating the impactor and identifying the load.