High-fidelity digital twins: Detecting and localizing weaknesses in structures

An adjoint-based procedure to determine weaknesses, or, more generally, the material properties of structures is developed and tested. Given a series of load cases and corresponding displacement/strain measurements, the material properties are obtained by minimizing the weighted differences between the measured and computed values. The present paper proposes and tests techniques to minimize the number of load cases and sensors. Several examples show the viability, accuracy and efficiency of the proposed methodology and its potential use for high fidelity digital twins.