Parameter identification of linear structural dynamic systems

The parameter estimations of linear multi-degree-of-freedom structural dynamic systems are carried out in time domain. Methods for estimating the system parameters and the modal parameters are presented. The equation of motion is transformed into the state space equation of the observable canonical form, and then into the auto-regressive and moving average model with auxiliary stochastic input (ARMAX) model to process the measurement data contaminated by the system noise as well as the output noise. The parameters of the ARMAX model are estimated by using the sequential prediction error method. Then, the parameters of equation of motion are recovered thereafter. In order to verify the accuracy of the estimation method, analytical simulation studies are performed for a model with two degrees of freedom on the basis of simulated data under various noise conditions. It is shown that the presented methods yield good estimates even under large noise conditions. The method is also applied to the identification of the modal parameters of a building model based on the experimental data.