Modal tracking under large environmental influence

Abstract

The installation of vibration-based structural health-monitoring systems relying in the study of natural frequencies to assess the condition of civil engineering structures is becoming more and more common. The extraction of these monitoring features can be achieved through automated operational modal analysis, combining output-only identification methods with cluster analyses, and comparing the identified modal properties with references, in a process known as modal tracking. However, changing environmental and operational conditions affect the dynamic behaviour of structures, disturbing the process of modal tracking, which may lead to the loss of important information and to misidentifications. In this context, this paper proposes a new methodology for modal tracking within the scope of automated operational modal analysis, especially prepared for scenarios with strong external influence on modal properties. A concrete arch dam with large variations of some natural frequencies is used as case study, and the proposed methodology is compared to a standard procedure using a quite unique monitoring data set continuously collected for 3 years.