Some Elements of Operational Modal Analysis

This paper gives an overview of the main components of operational modal analysis (OMA) and can serve as a tutorial for research oriented OMA applications. The paper gives a short introduction to the modeling of random responses and to the transforms often used in OMA such as the Fourier series, the Fourier integral, the Laplace transform, and the Z-transform. Then the paper introduces the spectral density matrix of the random responses and presents the theoretical solutions for correlation function and spectral density matrix under white noise loading. Some important guidelines for testing are mentioned and the most common techniques for signal processing of the operating signals are presented. The algorithms of some of the commonly used time domain and frequency domain identification techniques are presented and finally some issues are discussed such as mode shape scaling, and mode shape expansion. The different techniques are illustrated on the difficult case of identifying the three first closely spaced modes of the Heritage Court Tower building.