Application of the transmissibility concept in transfer path analysis

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in developing faster and simpler transfer path analysis (TPA) methods. A dominant class of these new approaches, often referred to as Operational Path Analyses (OPA), is designed to achieve this goal by using only operational data in conjunction with the application of the transmissibility concept. Despite the reduction in measurement time and complexity, these suffer from a number of limitations, such as problems related to the estimation of transmissibility, or the unreliability of the results due to cross-coupling between path inputs, etc., which makes them prone to errors. Some of these only apply to one specific method, while others are common to all transmissibility based approaches. The goal of this paper is to identify and describe these limitations and point out the potential dangers of applying such methods without taking these into account. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.