Abstract

Due to the inevitable degradation of material properties in structures in daily use, such as stiffness degradation due to cracking in concrete elements, their durability will definitely be influenced, and their serviceability and safety could be in danger. Thus, understanding and identifying the change in the structural parameters provides new approaches to evaluate their durability. Structural system identification by dynamic observability method, which is using subsets of masses, natural frequencies and modal shapes, is a powerful tool to detect the change of structural parameters. Taking into account the presence of noise in the measurement data in real world structures, this method establishes the relative dynamic equation with the error separation items. The equation is solved by error minimization of an objective function combining the measured frequencies and mode shapes through the parameter MAC (Modal Assurance Criterion). Additionally, the algorithms and the steps are introduced based on the dynamic eigenvalue equation, which can fully demonstrate the performance of observability techniques. The present paper provides an example on how to successfully identify structural parameters. Its suitability for practical applications is demonstrated in a large frame structure. The result is a much more accurate identification of the parameters involved in the durability of the structure even in the case of noise-corrupted measurement signals.