Reconstruction of distributed force characteristics in case of non punctual objects impacting beams

The inverse formulation considered to reconstruct the characteristics of an impact uses in general a technique of minimizing the root mean square error between the measured and the calculated responses. The problem takes like this the form of parametric identification. To perform this in practice, a large number of sensors or an excessive computing time are required. In this work, the characteristics of impact in case of an elastic beam with the impacting object not necessarily punctual are reconstructed. We use first the reciprocity theorem in order to decouple the localization problem from the identification problem. We solve then the localization problem by means of a particle swarm algorithm.