Inverse analysis of the magnitude and direction of impact force

This paper treats an inverse problem to estimate the magnitude and direction of impact force acting on a body of arbitrary shape. Three directional components of the impact force vector can be estimated from responses measured at more than three points of the body by means of deconvolution. It is pointed out that the impact force cannot always be estimated satisfactorily since the inverse problem is ill-posed or illconditioned in some situations. To improve the estimation accuracy, the least squares method based on the singular value decomposition is adopted. The validity of this method is demonstrated through an experiment in which the impact force acting on a simply supported beam is estimated from strain responses measured by strain gages.