Operational Modal Analysis of a Ship Model in the Presence of Harmonic Excitation

A ship is operated under an extremely complex environment, and waves and winds are assumed to be the stochastic excitations. Moreover, the propeller, host and mechanical equipment can also induce the harmonic responses. In order to reduce structural vibration, it is important to obtain the modal parameters information of a ship. However, the traditional modal parameter identification methods are not suitable since the excitation information is difficult to obtain. Natural excitation technique-eigensystem realization algorithm （NExT-ERA） is an operational modal identification method which abstracts modal parameters only from the response signals, and it is based on the assumption that the input to the structure is pure white noise. Hence, it is necessary to study the influence of harmonic excitations while applying the NExT-ERA method to a ship structure. The results of this research paper indicate the practical experiences under ambient excitation, ship model experiments were successfully done in the modal parameters identification only when the harmonic frequencies were not too close to the modal frequencies.

Structural modal parameter identifi cation and damage diagnosis based on Hilbert-Huang transform

Traditional modal parameter identifi cation methods have many disadvantages,especially when used for processing nonlinear and non-stationary signals.In addition,they are usually not able to accurately identify the damping ratio and damage.In this study,methods based on the Hilbert-Huang transform(HHT) are investigated for structural modal parameter identifi cation and damage diagnosis.First,mirror extension and prediction via a radial basis function(RBF) neural network are used to restrain the troublesome end-effect issue in empirical mode decomposition(EMD),which is a crucial part of HHT.Then,the approaches based on HHT combined with other techniques,such as the random decrement technique(RDT),natural excitation technique(NExT) and stochastic subspace identifi cation(SSI),are proposed to identify modal parameters of structures.Furthermore,a damage diagnosis method based on the HHT is also proposed.Time-varying instantaneous frequency and instantaneous energy are used to identify the damage evolution of the structure.The relative amplitude of the Hilbert marginal spectrum is used to identify the damage location of the structure.Finally,acceleration records at gauge points from shaking table testing of a 12-story reinforced concrete frame model are taken to validate the proposed approaches.The results show that the proposed approaches based on HHT for modal parameter identifi cation and damage diagnosis are reliable and practical.

Damage localization under ambient vibration using changes in flexibility

In recent years,Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has emerged as a new research area in civil engineering.Most existing health monitoring methodologies require direct measurement of input excitation for implementation.However,in many cases,there is no easy way to measure these inputs-or alternatively to externally excite the structure.Therefore,SHM methods based on ambient vibration have become important in civil engineering.In this paper,an approach is proposed based on the Damage Location Vector (DLV) method to handle the ambient vibration case.Here,this flexibility-matrix-based damage localization method is combined with a modal expansion technique to eliminate the need to measure the input excitation.As a by-product of this approach,in addition to determining the location of the damage,an estimate of the damage extent also can be determined.Finally,a numerical example analyzing a truss structure with limited sensors and noisy measurement is provided to verify the efficacy of the proposed approach.