Model updating is an effective means of damage identification and surrogate modeling has attracted considerable attention for saving computational cost in finite element (FE) model updating, especially for large-scale structures. In this context, a surrogate model of frequency is normally constructed for damage identification, while the frequency response function (FRF) is rarely used as it usually changes dramatically with updating parameters. This paper presents a new surrogate model based model updating method taking advantage of the measured FRFs. The Frequency Domain Assurance Criterion (FDAC) is used to build the objective function, whose nonlinear response surface is constructed by the Kriging model. Then, the efficient global optimization (EGO) algorithm is introduced to get the model updating results. The proposed method has good accuracy and robustness, which have been verified by a numerical simulation of a cantilever and experimental test data of a laboratory three-story structure.

Frequency Response Function (FRF) residues have been widely used to update Finite Element models. They are a kind of original measurement information and have the advantages of rich data and no extraction errors, etc. However, like other sensitivity-based methods, an FRF-based identification method also needs to face the ill-conditioning problem which is even more serious since the sensitivity of the FRF in the vicinity of a resonance is much greater than elsewhere. Furthermore, for a given frequency measurement, directly using a theoretical FRF at a frequency may lead to a huge difference between the theoretical FRF and the corresponding experimental FRF which finally results in larger effects of measurement errors and damping. Hence in the solution process, correct selection of the appropriate frequency to get the theoretical FRF in every iteration in the sensitivity-based approach is an effective way to improve the robustness of an FRF-based algorithm. A primary tool for right frequency selection based on the correlation of FRFs is the Frequency Domain Assurance Criterion. This paper presents a new frequency selection method which directly finds the frequency that minimizes the difference of the order of magnitude between the theoretical and experimental FRFs. A simulated truss structure is used to compare the performance of different frequency selection methods. For the sake of reality, it is assumed that not all the degrees of freedom (DoFs) are available for measurement. The minimum number of DoFs required in each approach to correctly update the analytical model is regarded as the right identification standard.