Enhancements to the continuous wavelet transform for damping identifications on short signals

The edge-effect of the wavelet transform can present a serious limitation to the identification of damping. In an attempt to overcome the problem posed by the edge-effect, this paper presents three new methods that are incorporated into the definition of the continuous wavelet transform: the reflected-window method, the equal-window-area method and the adaptive-wavelet function method. The effectiveness of these methods was tested on experimental data. It was found that with these methods the same rate of reliability could be achieved with a signal that was approximately three times shorter than the signal required by the classical CWT approach to damping identification. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.