Publication
The vibrational response of structural components carries valuable information about their underlying mechanical properties, health status and operational conditions. This underscores the need for the development of efficient physics-based inversion algorithms which, given a limited set of sensing data points and in the presence of measurement noise, can reconstruct the response at locations where measurement data is not available and/or identify the unknown mechanical properties. Addressing this challenge, Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have emerged as a promising approach. PINNs seamlessly integrate governing equations into their architecture and have gained significant interest in solving inversion problems. In the context of learning and inversion of multimodal, multiscale vibrational responses, this paper introduces a novel spectral extension of PINNs, utilizing Fourier basis functions in the wavenumber domain, commonly known as k-space. The proposed method, referred to as k-space PINN (k-PINN), offers a robust framework for adjusting complexity and wavenumber composition of the response. Notably, the spectral formulation of k-PINN, coupled with the generally sparse representation of vibrations in k-space, facilitate efficient reconstruction and learning of broadband vibrations and alleviate the spectral bias associated with standard PINN. Additionally, the spectral solution space introduced by k-PINN substantially reduces the computational cost associated with computing physics-informed loss terms. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology on reconstructing the bending vibrational mode shapes of a thin composite laminate and identifying its effective bending stiffness coefficients. Mode shapes are initially obtained from finite element simulation, and virtual test data with added noise are generated for evaluation purposes. It is shown that the proposed k-PINN methodology outperforms the standard PINN in terms of both learning and computational efficiency. The performance of k-PINN is further demonstrated by show casing its capability in learning different selections of symmetric, anti-symmetric and asymmetric mode shapes