Structural damping identification based on an iterative regularization method

A time domain structural damping identification method is presented in this paper. The damping of a structure is assumed to be time-invariant Rayleigh damping, time-variant Rayleigh damping and modal damping, respectively, and an iterative regularization method is proposed to identify these three types of damping in turn. A sensitivity approach is adopted in the formulation of the ill-posed inverse problem. A new constraint is imposed on the identified iterative increment as well as on the unknown structural parameters to ensure their physical meaning in the identification process is not lost. The proposed method is verified in numerical studies with a space frame structure and laboratory measurements of accelerations with accurate results. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.