Structural Identification and Damage Detection from Noisy Modal Data

In this paper we present a simple, yet powerful, method for the identification of stiffness matrices of structural and mechanical systems from information about some of their measured natural frequencies and corresponding mode shapes of vibration. The method is computationally efficient and is shown to perform remarkably well in the presence of measurement errors in the mode shapes of vibration. It is applied to the identification of the stiffness distribution along the height of a simple vibrating structure. An example illustrating the method’s ability to detect structural damage that could be highly localized in a building structure is also given. The efficiency and accuracy with which the method yields estimates of the system’s stiffness from noisy modal measurement data makes it useful for rapid, on-line damage detection of structures.