Structural Damping Ratio Identification through Iterative Frequency Domain Decomposition

The frequency domain decomposition method (FDD) is a commonly used method to identify structural modal parameters and analyze the structural dynamic performance. Although FDD has a high identification accuracy in natural frequencies and mode shapes, damping ratios cannot be identified accurately. The logarithmic decay method to identify the damping ratio in FDD needs the transformation from a narrow frequency band to the time domain, which leads to the loss of the corresponding mode outside the narrow band and add other modes in the narrow band. In this paper, an iterative frequency domain decomposition method (iFDD) is proposed to identify the structural damping ratio in frequency domain. Firstly, the natural frequencies and mode shapes are obtained by the FDD method, and the damping ratios during this identification process are assumed to be unknowns. Then, the natural frequencies, mode shapes, and unknowns are substituted into the output power spectrum formula to construct nonlinear equations. The damping ratios are obtained by solving the equations using iterative optimization methods. Finally, a numerical example and benchmark model are employed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results showed that the proposed iFDD method can identify the damping ratio precisely in the frequency domain, which is better than the traditional FDD performance.