Edinburgh Napier University

  Large-span steel trusses are widely used in public buildings such as large-span factory buildings, exhibition halls, gymnasiums, and bridges because of their fast construction speed and easy industrial manufacturing. Due to construction errors and environmental factors, the material properties may change during their service life, and it is an important prerequisite for the structural safety assessment to identify the true material parameters of the structure. Among the many parameters, the elastic modulus is one that has the greatest impact on the accuracy of structural safety analysis. In this paper, a mathematical analysis model of elastic modulus identification was constructed, based on the strain test data and the improved gradient regularization method. The relationship between the strain test data and elastic moduli was established. A common finite element program based on the method was developed to identify the elastic modulus. A series of numerical simulations was carried out on a 53-element steel truss model to study the availability and numerical stability of the method. The effects of different initial values, numbers of strain tests, and locations of the strain test as well as the number of unknown parameters on the identification results were studied. The results showed that the proposed method had very high accuracy and computational efficiency. For the case of 53 unknown parameters without considering the test error, the identification accuracy could reach a 1 × 10−10 order of magnitude after only several iterations. This paper provides an effective solution to obtain the actual values of the elastic modulus of steel truss structures in practical engineering.