Blind Modal Identification of Non-Classically Damped Systems from Free or Ambient Vibration Records

Abstract

A significant segment of system identification literature on civil structures is devoted to response-only identification, simply because lack of measurements of input excitations for civil structures is a fairly common scenario. In recent years, several researchers have successfully adapted a second-order blind identification (SOBI) technique—a method originally developed for “blind source separation” of audio signals—to response-only identification of mechanical and civil structures. However, this development had been confined to fully instrumented classically damped systems. While several approaches have been proposed recently for extending SOBI to non-classically damped systems, they all require additional data such as velocity or analytic signals. Herein, we present a version of SOBI that requires only acceleration signals recorded during free or ambient vibration tests, and yields the system's complex mode shapes, natural frequencies, and damping ratios. Performance of the proposed technique is demonstrated through two synthetic examples: a ten-story structure possessing a passive control system, and a soil-structure system with seven degrees of freedom (seven-DOF).