Updating structural dynamic models with emphasis on the damping properties

The control of complex structural models is a field of growing interest. The problem studied herein concerns damping updating using experimental frequency response functions. Although there are several methods improving structural dynamic models, only a few of them deal specifically with damping improvements. The method introduced is built on mechanical bases, using an error measure on the constitutive relations. The tuning strategy uses an iterative process, each iteration consisting of two steps. The first one is the localization of the erroneous regions. The second step is the correction of the parameters belonging to these regions. Examples illustrate the sensitivity of the error to the damping defects and its effectiveness for updating damped structures.