A strategy to identify exciting forces acting on structures

The strategy for identifying the external forces acting on structures sketched by Turco (Comput. Method Appl. Mech. Eng. 1998; 165:291–306) is extended to the dynamic case. Starting from the measurement of the stress or strain history in a suitable number of points of the structure, the exciting forces are reconstructed. This inverse problem is tackled in the frequency domain by using the standard tools of computational mechanics along with a classical approach to treat ill-conditioned problems. Some numerical results relating to pin-jointed trusses are discussed in order to validate the proposed strategy.