Innovative system identification methods for monitoring applications

Monitoring the modal parameters of civil and mechanical system received plenty of interest the last decades. Several approaches have been proposed and successfully applied in civil engineering for structural health monitoring of bridges (mainly based on the monitoring of the resonant frequencies and mode shapes). In applications such as the monitoring of offshore wind turbines and flight flutter testing the monitoring of the damping ratios are essential. For offshore wind turbine monitoring the presence of time-varying harmonic components, close to the modes of interest, can complicate the identification process. The difficulty related to flight flutter testing is that, in general, only short data records are available. The aim of this contribution is to introduce system identification methods and monitoring strategies that result in more reliable decisions and that can cope with complex monitoring applications. Basic concepts of system identification will be recapitulated with attention for monitoring aspects. The proposed monitoring methodology is based on the recently introduced Transmissibility-based Operational Modal Analysis (TOMA) approach