Journal of Sound and Vibration 330 (2011) 44134428

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Sound and Vibration

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jsvi

Experimental modal substructuring to estimate xed-base modes from tests on a exible xture
Matthew S. Allen a,n, Harrison M. Gindlin a, Randall L. Mayes b
a b

Department of Engineering Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 535 Engineering Research Building, 1500 Engineering Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA Sandia National Laboratories, PO Box 5800, Albuquerque, NM 87185, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history: Received 13 December 2010 Received in revised form 25 March 2011 Accepted 5 April 2011 Handling Editor: H. Ouyang Available online 14 May 2011

abstract
Fixed boundary conditions are often difcult if not impossible to simulate experimentally, but they are important to consider in many applications. In principle, modal substructuring or impedance coupling approaches can be used to predict the xed base modes of a system from tests where the system has some other boundary condition if the motion at the connection point can be measured, but this approach can be highly sensitive to imperfections in the experimental measurements. This work presents two alternatives that reduce the sensitivity to experimental errors, capitalizing on recent works where additional degrees of freedom are used to improve the robustness of substructure uncoupling. The system of interest is tested while mounted on a stiff xture, where some modes of the xture inevitably interact with those of the system of interest. The modes of the systemxture assembly are extracted using a modal test and then a modal substructuring approach is used to apply constraints to eliminate the motion of the xture. Two types of constraints are proposed, one based on the modes of the xture and the other on a singular value decomposition of the xture motion that was observed during the test. Neither approach requires an estimate of the displacements or rotations at the points where the system of interest is connected to the xture. The methods are validated by applying them to experimental measurements from a simple test system meant to mimic a exible satellite on a stiff shaker table. A nite element model of the subcomponents was also created and the method is applied to its modes in order to separate the effects of measurement errors and modal truncation. The proposed method produces excellent predictions of the rst several modes of the xedbase structure, so long as modal truncation is minimized. The proposed approach is also applied to experimental measurements from a wind turbine blade mounted in a stiff frame and found to produce reasonable results. & 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction No xture can reproduce a perfectly rigid boundary condition; at some frequency the interaction between the xture and the structure will begin to be important, causing the modes of the assembly to be considerably different from the xed-base modes that would be predicted by an idealized nite element model. However, it would be very convenient to be able to estimate the xed-base modes of a structure experimentally so they could be used to update or validate the model for the structure.

Corresponding author. Tel.: 1 608 890 1619. E-mail address: msallen@engr.wisc.edu (M.S. Allen).

0022-460X/$ - see front matter & 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jsv.2011.04.010

4414

M.S. Allen et al. / Journal of Sound and Vibration 330 (2011) 44134428

For example, testing and model validation campaigns for satellite systems often include both a low-vibration level modal test, used to extract the modal parameters of the system, and subsequent shaker testing at higher amplitudes to evaluate the durability of the system. Modal parameters extracted from the former are correlated with FEA models which are then used to predict the life of the structure in a specied environment. The latter tests are meant to verify the FEA predictions either by verifying that the test article survives the vibration environment or that the strains measured at critical points are the same as those predicted by the model. There are a number of reasons for desiring to combine those two tests. First, the high amplitude shaker tests better approximate the environment of interest, so it would be preferable to extract modal parameters from those tests in case the structure has any nonlinearity that would change its effective stiffness or damping with excitation level. Second, each test increases the time and cost required to develop the system, so signicant savings might be realized if one of the tests can be shortened or eliminated. This approach may also help minimize uncertainty in the boundary conditions that are applied in shaker testing, and it may be preferable to use the xed-base modal parameters for model updating rather than the freefree modal parameters. Blair discussed some of these issues in the context of model validation for space shuttle payloads in [1]. This work presents two methods that can be used to estimate the xed-base modes of a structure from tests on a exible shaker table, addressing many of these issues. To illustrate the proposed methodology, consider the system pictured in Fig. 1, which consists of a wind turbine blade mounted in a stiff xture. Suppose one desires to nd the modes that the turbine blade would have if it were constrained perfectly to ground. It is impractical to construct a xture that is rigid enough to adequately simulate a xed boundary condition over the frequency band of interest. However, using the method proposed in this work one could simply nd the modes of the blade when it is attached to the xture shown and then apply constraints to the identied modes to estimate the xed-base modes of the blade. This system will be treated in detail in Section 4. A few previous works have explored methods for predicting xed-base modal parameters from test measurements. These were discussed in Mayes and Bridgers [2] so only a few key observations will be repeated here. Using classical frequency-based substructuring (FBS) [3] or impedance coupling [4,5] methods, one can, in principle, estimate the xedbase properties of a test article if all of the displacements and rotations, as well as the forces and moments between the test article and the supporting structure are measured. This is rarely possible and often leads to ill-conditioning in the coupling equations even if the necessary moments and forces can be measured. Mayes and Bridgers presented a method that avoids the need to measure the interface forces and displacements and which seems to minimize this ill conditioning [2]. They used frequency based substructuring to couple the modal motions of a shaker table to ground using the authors modal constraint approach [7] (some additional details were presented in their preliminary works [6,8]). The authors work and a few other recent papers [911] have all revealed that it is important to consider other degrees of freedom in addition to the connection point(s) when uncoupling two substructures. Mayes and Bridgers extended these ideas to constrain a substructure to ground (rather than removing it), and showed that their approach was capable of extracting the rst xed-base mode of a cantilever beam from measurements on a simplied shake table. This work expands upon Mayes and Bridgers work in two ways. First, this work employs modal substructuring rather than frequency based substructuring. The modal substructuring approach is convenient because one only needs to manipulate the modes of the structure, whereas with frequency based substructuring the entire frequency response function matrix must be manipulated at each frequency line. Second, this work considers a large number of modes of both the xture alone and the xture structure, showing that the approach also works well for higher modes and exploring the test frequency bandwidth needed to estimate xed-base modes over a desired frequency range. The proposed

Fig. 1. Photograph of a 4.3 m wind turbine blade mounted in a stiff frame during the modal test described in Section 4.

M.S. Allen et al. / Journal of Sound and Vibration 330 (2011) 44134428

4415

methodology is a special case of modal substructuring, specically, coupling one substructure to another that is innitely rigid. There is a large body of literature concerning modal substructuring, much of which is described in two review articles [3,12]. A few details will be repeated here to explain the basis for the proposed approach. Modal substructuring is known to provide accurate results so long as the modal bases of the substructures are adequate to describe their motion in the assembled conguration. Several approaches have been proposed to assure that this is the case. The CraigBampton [13] approach is the most popular in the analytical realm, but it is poorly suited for experiments since it requires a test on each of the substructures with rigid boundary conditions, which, as mentioned earlier, can usually not be adequately approximated in the laboratory. The free modes of a structure are much easier to obtain experimentally, but they are known to constitute a poor basis for substructuring predictions [14], as nicely illustrated in [15]. Better results are obtained when the free modes are augmented with residuals to account for the exibility of out of band modes, as pioneered in [14,16,17]. However, the residual terms are weakly represented in the measurements and can be difcult to accurately measure, and one must typically apply many additional inputs to obtain a full set of residual exibilities. Several researchers have made strides in addressing this issue by, for example, creating and then updating FEA models to estimate the residuals rather than attempting to measure them completely [15,18], but there are limitations to this approach and further research is needed. For these reasons, the authors have pursued a different approach in which the mass-loaded interface modes of the structure are used in place of the free modes [7,19,20]. Mass-loaded modes naturally form a much more efcient modal basis than free modes, yet they are relatively easy to measure experimentally, especially using new techniques that do not require the attached masses to be completely rigid [7]. The methodology proposed here builds on the mass-loaded modes approach, using it to constrain one subsystem to ground. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the proposed modal substructuring techniques that are used to apply a set of constraints that convert the measured modes to xed-base modes. In Section 3 the proposed methodology is evaluated by applying it to a simple platebeam structure. Experiments are performed to nd the modes of the xture (plate) and the xture structure (plate beam), and the substructuring results are presented revealing some important considerations. The method is applied to a wind turbine blade in a stiff xture in Section 4 and Section 5 then summarizes the conclusions. 2. Theoretical development Suppose that a structure of interest is attached to a exible xture. A modal test [4] could be performed to obtain N modes of vibration at a certain set of measurement points, resulting in the following modal parameters for the xture structure: " #

or , z r ,

uf , us

(1)

where or is the rth natural frequency of the structure, zr is the corresponding damping ratio and the matrices uf and us contain the mass-normalized mode shapes at the measurement points on the xture, yf, and substructure, ys, respectively. The index r ranges over all of the measured modes, r 1,y,N. The xture is a dynamic system itself, although it is meant to approximate a rigid boundary condition. For example, the shake tables discussed in [2] can be thought of as stiff, translating xtures. One can also obtain the modal parameters of the xture alone (without the structure of interest attached) either through test or analysis, and its modal parameters are denoted:

ofixt zfixt ufixt r , r , f :

(2)

The natural frequencies and damping ratios of the xture are not needed in any of the following, only the mass normalized mode shapes of the xture, ufixt f . If the xture were truly rigid and perfectly xed to ground, then the motion of the xture, yf, and the corresponding mode shapes, uf, would be zero. In practice this will not be the case. The most straightforward remedy would be to estimate both the displacement and rotation at the points where the structure joins the xture and then to apply constraints to force that motion to be zero. However, that method is not reliable as will be illustrated in Section 3.3. When uncoupling one substructure from another, recent research has revealed that one must consider other points in addition to the connection point in order to avoid ill-conditioning [7,9,11]. Those results seem to be relevant to this problem as well, prompting the alternative approach that is described below. 2.1. Modal constraints In this work, we shall presume that the measured xture motion, yxt, can be approximated as follows in terms of Nxt modes of the xture:
fixt yfixt  ufixt , f q

(3)

4416

M.S. Allen et al. / Journal of Sound and Vibration 330 (2011) 44134428

where qxt, denotes the modal coordinates of the xture. This expression can be inverted to nd the participation of each fixt xture mode (i.e. using a modal lter [21]), as qfixt  ufixt , where () denotes the MoorePenrose pseudo-inverse of f y the matrix. The estimate of the xture modal amplitudes is only meaningful here if one has at least as many measurement has full column rank. points as modes of interest and if the measurement locations on the xture are chosen such that ufixt f If the modal basis of the xture is sufciently rich, then it will be adequate to span the space of the motion of the xture even after the structure is attached (i.e. of the xture structure). If this is the case, then the xture modal motions can be estimated from the measured motions, yf, as follows:
fixt qfixt  ufixt f yf uf uf q,

(4)

where q denotes the modal coordinates of the xture structure . Our desire is to estimate the modal parameters that the structure would have if it were attached to a truly rigid xture. One way to do this is to apply the constraints, qfixt 0, (5)

to the modes of the xture structure using the Ritz method [6,7,22]. In terms of the modal coordinates of the xture structure, the constraint equations are
ufixt f y f 0,

(6)

or
ufixt f uf q 0 ,

(7)

either of which constitutes a set of Nxt constraint equations. The matrix multiplying q is the matrix [a] in the text by Ginsberg [22], or B in the review by de Klerk et al. [3]. The procedure described in either of those works can be used to enforce these constraints and hence to estimate the modes of the xture structure with the xture motion nullied. The ritzscomb Matlabs routine, which is freely available from the rst author or on the Matlab Central File Exchange, implements the method in [22] and was used to perform the calculations for this work. It is important to note that the constraints above only enforce zero motion at the xture measurement points if the number of measurement points equals the number of xture modes. In practice one should use more measurement points on the xture than there are active modes in order to average out noise and measurement errors. However, when this is done the motions of the physical measurement points may not be exactly zero after applying the constraints. In the best case the residual motion would be due only to measurement noise, but there might also be residual motion in the xture that is physical, since one is seeking to constrain an innite dimensional system with a nite number of constraints. Fortunately, one can readily observe the xture motions after applying the constraints to see whether the constraints were effective in enforcing a rigid boundary condition. This is illustrated in Section 3.2 and provides a valuable way to check whether enough modes were used in Eq. (7). 2.2. Singular vector constraints In some cases it may not be feasible to perform a modal test on the xture alone in order to estimate ufixt f . There also may be situations in which the free modes of the xture do not form an efcient basis for the motion of the xture structure, so some other basis must be considered. In these cases one alternative is to use the dominant singular vectors of the xture mode shape matrix to form the constraints. The rst step is to perform a singular value decomposition (SVD) of the xture motions observed on the xture structure

uf USVT ,

(8)

where U is a matrix of singular vectors, S a diagonal matrix of corresponding singular values and V reveals how each singular vector participates in each of the modes. Both U and V are orthonormal. If the motion of the xture is sufciently simple, then it is likely to be captured in only a few, NSVD, dominant vectors, so one can approximate the xture motion as follows: yf  UNSVD SNSVD VNSVD T qf ,
NSVD NSVD

(9)

and V contain only the rst NSVD columns of U and V, respectively, and S is an NSVD NSVD matrix where U containing only the rst NSVD singular values along its diagonal. The following constraint will set this approximation to the xtures motion to zero: UNSVD T yf 0: (10)

This is an alternative to the constraints in Eq. (7) and avoids having to measure the modes of the xture alone. This approach shall be termed SVD constraints in the following.

M.S. Allen et al. / Journal of Sound and Vibration 330 (2011) 44134428

4417

In some cases, one might wish to mix the free-mode approach with this SVD approach. For example, the authors have found that when a system contains rigid body modes, it is critical to include them before considering any other motions contained in uf. Specically, if the mode shape matrix is divided into rigid body and elastic modes as h i (11) uf uf RB uf e then one would perform SVD as in Eq. (8) but only on the partition of elastic modes uf e . The resulting singular vectors could be used together with the rigid body modes as a basis for the constraints as follows: h i uf RB UNSVD e yf 0, (12) where UNSVD e are the rst NSVD singular vectors of uf e . This approach is used in Section 3 and compared with the freemodes approach. The standard SVD approach in Eq. (10) is used in Section 4 where the proposed methods are applied to a wind turbine blade in a test frame. 3. Evaluation of methodology using plate beam system 3.1. Application using experimental measurements from plate beam A simple system, consisting of a 12.35 in. long steel beam attached to a 12 10 in. steel plate was constructed to evaluate the proposed approach. The 1 in. 0.5 in. cross-section beam is the substructure of interest, and the 0.625 in. thick steel plate is stiff and approximates a rigid boundary condition. A schematic of the system is shown in Fig. 2, with the left picture looking down the beam onto the plate (the beam extends from the origin in the negative x-direction), and the right gure looking parallel to the surface of the plate showing the beam standing up. The measurement grid used in the experiments is also shown, along with the locations used for three uni-axial accelerometers. The red circles show the locations of the accelerometers used to test the plate beam, the blue show those used when the plate was tested alone to nd ufixt (references to color pertain only to the online version of this article). The accelerometers placed on the plate were f actually placed on the underside of the plate so that the structure could be excited from above at each of the points shown. The dimensions of the plate and beam were chosen so that many of the natural frequencies of the plate would be equal to those of the xed-base beam. This assured that the modes of the plate and beam would interact creating an interesting case study. The assembly was placed on an inated rubber tube to simulate free-boundary conditions, which were realized quite effectively since the rst vibration mode of the system was about 10 times higher than the highest rigid body mode of the system on the inner tube, conforming to the guidelines in [23]. Fig. 3 shows a photograph of the setup. The beam is

Fig. 2. Schematic of platebeam system used to estimate the xed-base modes of a steel beam. (For interpretation of the references to color in this gure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

4418

M.S. Allen et al. / Journal of Sound and Vibration 330 (2011) 44134428

Fig. 3. Photograph of the experimental setup showing the plate beam on top of an inated tube. Two of the accelerometers are visible, the 3rd is located on the back of the beam in this setup so only its cable is visible.

attached to the plate with two hex screws. Some initial measurements were processed with the zeroed-fast Fourier transform nonlinearity detection method described in [24], which revealed that the natural frequencies of the system did decrease signicantly with increasing excitation amplitude. To remedy this, the system was disassembled and reassembled with adhesive between the beam and plate and with the bolts very tight. After doing this, the method in [24] no longer revealed signicant nonlinearity and testing proceeded. A roving hammer modal test was used to obtain the modal parameters of the system. Three hits were applied to each of the 36 points on the plate, 6 on the y-side, 6 on the z-side, 12 on the y-side of the beam, and 12 also on the z-side of the beam giving 72 total measurement points. Once a reasonable set of FRFs had been obtained, the modes were identied using the AMI algorithm [2628] and the mode shapes and natural frequencies were imported into Matlab to perform the substructuring analysis. A similar set of tests was also performed on the plate without the beam attached to estimate ufixt f . Table 1 lists the natural frequencies found for the plate and plate beam. The experiments were designed to extract all modes below 3 kHz and the results show that those and quite a few more were extracted. Comparing the natural frequencies before and after adding the beam, we see that the beam causes the rst mode of the plate to split, the familiar vibration absorber effect, and similar mode splits for the 3rd and 4th elastic modes of the plate. This mode splitting is illustrated in Figs. 4 and 5, which show the 3rd and 4th mode shapes of the plate beam. The surface plot shows the deection of the plate and the two line plots show the bending of the beam in both the y- and z-directions. The beam bending has an opposite sense in the 4th mode as in the 3rd mode, demonstrating that the beam is acting as a vibration absorber for the plate. In either mode shape the motion of the beam resembles the 2nd analytical mode shape for a cantilever in the y-direction, so one would expect this pair of modes to merge to a single bending mode of the beam once the constraints at the base of the beam are enforced. The beams displacement in the z-direction is small and presumably dominated by noise or errors in the alignment of the hammer blows. The experimentally measured plate and plate beam modes were used in the procedure described in Section 2 to estimate the xed-base modes of the beam. That procedure requires an estimate of the rigid body modes of the system, and rather than measure those a nite element (FEA) model (the same one described later in Section 3.2) was used to estimate them. Hence, CMS was performed by combining six FEA rigid body modes with 18 experimentally measured plate beam modes, and then creating ufixt with six FEA rigid body modes for the plate alone and six measured plate f modes for a total of 12 constraints in Eq. (7). The density of the FEA model was adjusted to reproduce the measured mass of the system. (The FEA model was also validated by comparing it with the experimental results, as described in Section 3.2, but that is not particularly relevant to the results presented here.) Table 2 shows the modal substructuring (CMS) predictions

M.S. Allen et al. / Journal of Sound and Vibration 330 (2011) 44134428

4419

Table 1 Experimentally measured natural frequencies (Hz) of the plate and plate beam. Nat. freqs. (Hz) of elastic modes Mode 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 Plate alone (xture) 670.5 893.7 1344.0 1620.3 1850.4 2538.0 3107.8 3143.6 3591.1 4082.0 4814.5 4837.7 5220.6 5561.4 6765.1 7093.4 7147.8 7179.0 7808.4 8288.7 8414.8 Mode 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 Plate beam 130.7 224.0 628.3 693.8 902.4 1254.4 1350.2 1657.8 1770.7 1797.8 1906.1 2311.9 2995.7 3107.7 3233.0 3424.5 3522.8 3845.5 Plate beam modes Beam Beam Beam Beam Plate Beam Beam Plate Beam Beam Beam Plate Plate Plate Plate Beam Beam Plate 1y 1z 2y Plate 2y Plate 2z Plate 2z Plate 3y Plate 3y Plate 3y Plate

3z Plate 4y Plate

Mode 3 at 628.3 Hz 2

Beam Deformation

Beam

y disp

0.5 x disp

5 10 15 Beam Axial Position (x)

0.5

2 1 z disp

1 10 15

0 1 2 3 0 5 10 15 Beam Axial Position (x)

Fig. 4. Mode shape of 3rd elastic mode of the plate beam: (a) shows a three-dimensional view of the deformation of the plate, while (b) and (c) show the deection of the beam in the y- and z-directions. The beam is xed to the plate midway between the two square markers, as illustrated schematically.

as well as the analytical natural frequencies of a cantilever beam with the same properties as the actual beam. The rst ve CMS predicted natural frequencies agree fairly well with the analytical ones, but beyond the 5th the predicted natural frequencies are inaccurate. The rule of thumb for CMS predictions is that coupled system predictions are typically valid over a bandwidth, BW Hz, if modes for each substructure are used out to 1.5*BW or 2*BW. Here, modes out to 3000 Hz were used in the CMS predictions, so one would expect the results to be accurate out to 1500 or 2000 Hz. The errors in the CMS predicted natural frequencies are below 10 percent for the rst ve modes, which suggests that this rule of thumb may be

e id "s 10

5 5 0 0

10

" 12

z) e( sid

) (y

4420

M.S. Allen et al. / Journal of Sound and Vibration 330 (2011) 44134428

Mode 4 at 693.8 Hz 2 1 1 0.5

x disp y disp

Beam Deformation

0 -1 -2 0 5 10 15

0 -0.5 -1 10 15

Beam Axial Position (-x) 2 1

z disp

0 -1 -2 0 5 10 15

10 "

si d

10 5 0 0
si 12" de (z )

(y )

Beam Axial Position (-x)

Fig. 5. Mode shape of 4th elastic mode of the plate beam (see description for Fig. 4).

Table 2 Estimated xed-base natural frequencies of the beam found using the free-mode procedure with 12 modes of the plate and 24 plate beam modes. The natural frequencies of the plate beam before substructuring are shown in Table 1. CMS prediction with 12 MCFS constraints 104.1 195.2 651.4 1230.5 1777.1 1823.0 2369.4 2923.8 3045.3 3352.8 3503.8 3620.2 Analytical xed-base beam freq. (Hz) 107.35 214.70 672.8 1345.5 1883.4 3691.4 3766.8 6102.2 7382.9 9115.6 12,204.3 12,731.7 Percent error in CMS prediction 3.0 9.1 3.2 8.6 5.6 50.6 37.1 52.1 58.8 63.2 71.3 71.6

valid for this CMS procedure. One also observes that the modes that involve z-direction motion have larger percent errors. The z-direction is the stiffer of the two bending directions of the beam. As mentioned in Section 2, it is advisable to observe the motion of the xture after applying the constraints in Eq. (7) to check whether enough constraints were used to force the xture motion to zero. This was done and the norm of the motion over the plate was found to be between 0.6 and 4.3 percent of the maximum mode shape for the rst six modes estimated by CMS, suggesting that the constraints were quite effective. The motion of the plate after applying the constraints had no recognizable pattern, suggesting that it was due to noise in the measured mode shapes, so it is not shown. The mode shapes over the beam are shown in Fig. 6. Each plot overlays the estimated y-bending shape, z-bending shape and the analytical shape of a cantilever with the same properties as the experimental. The shapes agree very well. There is a scale difference between the rst bending modes and the analytical, but otherwise the shapes are quite similar. The second modes also agree closely, but the shapes near the root of the beam suggest that the rotation there may not be exactly zero. The CMS procedure was repeated using different numbers of plate modes, and hence different numbers of constraints. There were larger errors in the predicted natural frequencies for modes 3 and 4 if fewer than eight constraints were used, while mode 5 was not accurately predicted unless at least 12 constraints were used. However, there was virtually no improvement in the natural frequencies if the number of constraints was increased from 12 to 16. If more than 16 were used then one begins to have only a few modes left in the system (i.e. 2418 6), causing the results to degrade.

M.S. Allen et al. / Journal of Sound and Vibration 330 (2011) 44134428

4421

3 2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 0 2 4 6 8 x-position (in) 10 12 14 Exper y Exper z Analytical

3 2 1 0 -1 -2 -3 0 2 4 6 8 x-position (in) 10 12 14 Exper y Exper z Analytical

Fig. 6. Mode shapes of the beam found with the proposed CMS procedure. For comparison, the analytical mode shapes of an EulerBernoulli cantilever are also shown: (a) shows the rst mode in both the y- and z-directions while (b) shows the 2nd mode in each direction.

The procedure based on the singular value decomposition was also used on this system. The SVD was computed of the elastic plate xture modes that were identied experimentally, and the six rigid body modes were used in Eq. (12) together with the six dominant singular vectors. Quite similar results were obtained with this method. The errors in the rst three modes were 3.23, 9.78 and 3.16 percent, respectively, which are very similar to the results above in Table 2. The errors were higher for the 4th and 5th modes, 10.1 and 12.0 percent, respectively. The mode shapes obtained were very similar to those shown in Fig. 6. Although the results are not as accurate as was obtained with the freemodes, this method produced reasonable results and has the signicant advantage that it does not require an additional test to estimate the modes of the xture alone. 3.2. Finite element simulation of substructuring for plate beam A nite element model was created to estimate the rigid body mode shapes, as mentioned previously, and also to determine whether the discrepancies between the CMS and analytical modes observed in Section 3.1 were due to noise in the experimental results or whether modal truncation was the culprit. The FE model was constructed with simple shell and beam elements, with 21 nodes along the length of the beam and 405 eight-node shell elements for the plate. The mesh was such that the elements on the beam were 0.95 in. long while the elements used for the plate were 1.0 in2. The FEM was validated by comparing the FEM modes and natural frequencies with those obtained experimentally, the results of which are shown in Table 5 in the Appendix. The comparison there shows that the correlation between the experiment and FEA model is excellent, suggesting that the FE model is an accurate representation of the real system. The Modal Assurance Criterion (MAC) [4] between the experimentally measured mode shapes and the FEA mode shapes are all above 0.92. This is a simple system and easy to model, so one would expect the FEA model to be highly accurate and to show how well the proposed CMS procedure would work with near perfect measurements. The FEA models for the plate and plate beam were used in conjunction with the proposed procedure to estimate the xed-base modes of the beam. Only the mode shapes at the measurement points dened in Fig. 2 were used to facilitate the comparison with the experimental results that were presented previously. The results were very similar to those found experimentally Table 2. The errors in the rst ve modes were 3.8, 14.4, 3.8, 12.3 and 3.9 percent, respectively,

4422

M.S. Allen et al. / Journal of Sound and Vibration 330 (2011) 44134428

2.5 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 FEA-CMS y FEA-CMS z Analytical

6 8 x-position (in)

10

12

14

3 2 1 0 -1 -2 FEA-CMS y FEA-CMS z Analytical

6 8 x-position (in)

10

12

14

Fig. 7. Mode shapes of xed-base beam predicted by CMS using FEA-derived mode shapes, compared with the analytical mode shapes (see caption for Fig. 6).

while the higher modes had much larger errors as in the experimental results. As observed in the experimental results, only the rst ve modes are well predicted by CMS, and the even natural frequencies (z-direction bending) are less accurate than the odd ones. Surprisingly, the 2nd and 4th natural frequencies found here using the FEA modes are less accurate than those found using the experimental modes. The mode shapes predicted by CMS, shown in Fig. 7, match almost perfectly with the analytical ones, although some small residual rotation is visible at the base of the cantilever. As mentioned in Section 2, it is advisable to check the motion of the xture to assure that the constraints were adequate to reduce its motion to a negligible amount. This was investigated by plotting the mode shapes of the plate after applying the constraints in Eq. (7). Those plots do show a marked rotation of the plate in the bending direction of the beam for each of the beams bending modes, as illustrated for mode 4 in Fig. 8. The plate motion is less than 0.03, while the maximum plate motion in each of the modes of the plate was about 1.0 before the constraints were applied. The plate motion shows a nonzero rotation in the bending direction of the beam (rotation in the z-direction, about the y-axis), which would reduce the effective stiffness of the beam somewhat. However, the rotation is less than a degree, so one would expect it to be negligible. Another way of determining whether modal truncation is important is to check that the plates free modes span the space of the observed plate beam modes. If this is not the case, then the approximation in Eq. (3) will not be accurate. To check this, the FEA predicted modes for the plate beam were projected onto the plate modes using fixt uproj f ufixt f uf uf . The largest difference between the projected shape and the measured shape was found and divided by the maximum absolute value of any coefcient in that shape. This gives the maximum percent error in each expanded shape, given in Table 3. Modes 116 of the plate beam are accurately captured with 12 plate modes, but modes 17 and 18 show signicant errors. Those errors could be reduced to 13 and 12 percent, respectively, by increasing the number of constraints from 12 to 16, but, as mentioned previously, the predicted natural frequencies did not change noticeably when 16 constraints were used instead of 12. 3.3. Discussion The fact that the CMS predictions have about the same level of error as the experimental predictions suggests that the errors in both methods are dominated by modal truncation. This is reassuring, especially considering the large errors that are sometimes encountered in substructuring predictions due to cross-axis sensitivity and other unavoidable experimental

M.S. Allen et al. / Journal of Sound and Vibration 330 (2011) 44134428

4423

Mode 4 at 1181 Hz 2 0 -2 -4 0 -0.01 2 -0.02 z disp -0.03 10 15

10 "s

Beam Deformation

0.03 0.02 0.01 xdisp

y disp

5 10 Beam Axial Pos (-x)

15

0 -2 -4

5
id e (y

10 5
)

0 0

12

id "s

e(

z)

5 10 Beam Axial Pos (-x)

15

Fig. 8. Deection of plate and beam in 4th estimated mode (after constraining plate motion to zero). In the three dimensional plot the beam (not shown) would be located midway between the square markers on the plate (see the description for Fig.4).

Table 3 Maximum error in expansion of the FEA mode shapes for the plate beam onto the 12 plate modes. Mode Zero for modes 16 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 Nat. freq. Max. err. (percent)

126.34 207.2 630.96 688.82 899.33 1207.9 1349.2 1641.3 1786.1 1895.3 2316.9 2996.3

0.6 1.6 1.6 1.3 0.3 6.2 1.9 1.4 4.3 5.4 35.1 58.0

errors [29,30]. A standard, inexpensive modal test was used to obtain the modes that were used in this work, yet those modes were still accurate enough to obtain reasonable estimates of the xed-base natural frequencies of the system. The alternative to the approach presented in this paper would be to estimate the rotations and displacements at the connection point and then to apply constraints to force them to be zero. The connection point motions are known to be difcult to measure, so that method was expected to be more sensitive to noise. To explore this, an alternate analysis was performed in which some of the measurements (those points within the rectangle denoted with a dashed line in Fig. 2) were used to estimate the displacement and rotation of the connection point in the out of plane direction. The measurements on the perimeter of the plate were used to estimate the in plane motion. The connection point motion in all six degrees of freedom was then constrained to zero to estimate the xed-base modes of the beam. When this approach was used, the estimates for the rst two bending modes of the beam were in error by 14 and 21 percent, respectively (as compared to 3 and 9 percent for the proposed method, see Table 2). The next few modes identied by this approach were spurious with varying degrees of motion of both the plate and beam. Clearly the methods presented here produce better qualitative results. It should also be noted that no residual terms were used in the analysis just described. Residuals have been found to signicantly improve the modal basis when two free-mode models are joined. Unfortunately, residuals cannot easily be incorporated into the methodology presented here. Residuals could be readily incorporated into a frequency based substructuring algorithm based on connection point constraints, but here the focus was on a modal approach that minimizes the ill-conditioning that is present in the connection-point problem.

4424

M.S. Allen et al. / Journal of Sound and Vibration 330 (2011) 44134428

On the other hand, it is disappointing that the natural frequencies estimated by the proposed methods are not more accurate. This was explored in order to identify the cause. The fact that the plate shows residual rotation near the connection point in Fig. 8 suggests that the modal basis used to describe the plate may not have been adequate to completely constrain its motion to ground. The plate seems to be deforming near the point where the beam is connected. In order to understand the effect of this localized deformation on the CMS predictions, another model was created where this region was stiffened. In this model, a 4 in. 4 in. square of the plate surrounding the point where the beam connects (outlined with a dashed line in Fig. 2) was made to be three times as thick (1.875 in.) as the rest of the plate (0.625 in.). This signicantly increases the stiffness of the plate near the connection point and would be expected to reduce the localized kinking shown in Fig. 8. This model was used in the CMS procedure as described above and the xed-base natural frequencies of the beam were estimated. The errors in the CMS predicted frequencies for y-direction bending, the 1st, 3rd and 5th natural frequencies, were only 0.3, 0.5 and 0.8 percent, respectively, using this modied plate model, as compared to 3.8, 3.8 and 3.9 percent for the regular plate as discussed in Section 3.2. Similarly, the errors in the z-direction bending frequencies reduced from 14.4 and 12.3 percent to 1.3 and 2.1 percent, respectively. This suggests that localized bending of the connection point was responsible for the errors observed in the natural frequencies. In future works this difculty can and should be addressed by designing the xturing to minimize localized bending, otherwise a very large number of modes might be needed to obtain accurate predictions of the xedbase modes.

4. Application to wind turbine blade The proposed methods were also used to estimate the xed-base modes of a wind turbine blade, from measurements where the blade was mounted in a stiff frame. Fig. 1 shows a photograph of the blade in question, a 4.3 m long blade from a 20 kW wind turbine manufactured by Renewegy LLC. The blade is mounted in a frame which was designed to hold the blades during fatigue testing. The frame is stiff, but its exibility becomes important for many of the modes of the blade, so the methods presented in this work will be used to estimate its xed-base modes. The xed-base modes are desired to validate and update the nite element model of the blades. Fig. 9 shows a schematic of the system indicating all of the measurement points acquired during the test. Only a part of one day was available for the testing, and the geometry of the frame was not known in detail before arriving, so very little pre-test planning was performed. Three accelerometers were mounted near the tip of the blade as shown in the schematic, the lower of the two was a high sensitivity triaxial accelerometer, and two of its channels were recorded corresponding to apwise (z-direction in Fig. 9) and edgewise (y-direction in Fig. 9) motion of the blade. The other accelerometer measured only the apwise motion. The accelerometers can also be seen in the inlaid photograph in Fig. 1. All of the points indicated in Fig. 9 were excited using an impact hammer and reciprocity was used to form an 89 output by 3 input matrix of FRFs. The accelerometers correspond to points 101z, 2z and 52y. After some investigation, the FRFs corresponding to input points on the xture were found to be very noisy in the measurements from the low sensitivity accelerometer (at point 101z), so the measurements from that accelerometer were discarded. Also note that the frame is anchored to the ground by eight bolts, four of which are seen in Fig. 1. The measurement points 311363 were chosen away from those anchors,

120 119 118 117 116 115 114 113 112 111 110 109

Accel. 107 105 6 5 4 103 3 2 101 1 x

z
223 213

254 (264) 20 253 (263) y 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8

203

70y

60y

Triaxial Accel.

...51y

222

202

212

252 (262)

251
221 201 211 (261)

311 (321)

312 (322)

313 (323)

351 (361)

352 (362)

353 (363)

y
Fig. 9. Schematic of wind turbine blade mounted in the xture showing measurement point locations. Measurement points shown in parenthesis are in the corresponding positions on the front leg of the frame.

M.S. Allen et al. / Journal of Sound and Vibration 330 (2011) 44134428

4425

100 Magnitude (m s-2 N-1)

10-1

10-2

Data Fit Fit Error

0 180 Phase () 90 0 -90 -180 0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

160

180

200

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

160

180

200

Frequency (Hz)
Fig. 10. Magnitude and phase of frequency response function corresponding to acceleration at 2z and input at 16z. Lines correspond to: (solid gray) measurement, (dash-dot green) curve t, and (solid red) difference between measurement and curve t (references to color are applicable only to the online version of the article). (For interpretation of the references to color in this gure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

but even then the blade moved little when excited on this lower part of the frame. In all of the measurements, an exponential window was employed to accelerate the decay of the low frequency modes and the FRFs were estimated using the H1 method with three averages at each point. The measurements were then curve t and the rst 18 mass-normalized modes of the system were extracted. Fig. 10 shows a sample of the measurements and the curve t that was obtained using the AMI algorithm [26]. The measurements appear to be of reasonable quality, although the residual after curve tting is somewhat larger than might be obtained in an ideal scenario. The rst two modes of the beam were t separately as this was found to produce reconstructed FRFs that agreed more closely with the measurements. The natural frequencies of the modes that were identied are shown in Table 4. For brevity the mode shapes are not shown, but they were viewed, and a description is listed for each of the modes, indicating whether the motion of the blade was primarily bending in the apwise direction (FW), edgewise direction (EW), or torsion of the blade. Beyond the 18th mode the blades modal density became quite high so curve tting was not attempted. A few of the modes seem to show similar motion of the blade occurring at two or more distinct frequencies. For example, the 6th and 7th modes both resemble the 4th bending mode of a cantilever beam, and their frequencies are quite similar. This is illustrated in Fig. 11, which shows the mode shapes of Modes 6 and 7 before applying the constraint procedure to estimate the xed base modes. Two traces are shown for each blade, corresponding to the measurement points on the leading and trailing edges. (The estimate for mode 6 obtained using the SVD method is also shown, as is discussed later.) Inspection of the 6th and 7th mode shapes reveals that the xture is acting as a vibration absorber for these two modes. Both modes show a similar deformed shape of the blade, but the xture bends in one direction for the 6th mode and in the opposite for the 7th. The 15th and 16th modes showed a similar phenomenon, although torsion of the beam was also apparent in each of those modes. The motion of the blades was at least 10 times higher than the motion of the xture for all of the modes. The lower modes generally showed less motion of the xture while the higher frequency modes showed about a factor of 10 difference between the two. The motion of the upright part of the frame (points 200264) was typically larger than the motion on the lower part (points 300363). The proposed CMS procedure was applied to the modes in the far left column in Table 4 in order to estimate the xedbase modes of the blade. Since limited time was available, a separate test could not be performed on the xture alone, so the SVD method described in Section 2.2 was used. Some initial tests produced some unreasonable results and investigation revealed that the curve ts were unreliable at measurements points 300336 due to noise in the measurements. As a result, the mode shapes at those points were not used in the CMS procedure. After discarding those points, the rst six singular values of the mode shape matrix at the xture locations, ufixt were 0.183, 0.125, 0.079, 0.040, f 0.026 and 0.017. The rst three are at least twice as large as the rest, and the mode shapes suggest that there are two or

4426

M.S. Allen et al. / Journal of Sound and Vibration 330 (2011) 44134428

Table 4 Natural frequencies of wind turbine blade in frame. The mode shape descriptions indicate which modes correspond to edgewise bending (EW), apwise (FW) bending and torsion. Mode num. Mode shape description Natural freq. (Hz) 2 SVD constraints fn CMS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 FW B1 EW B1 FW B2 EW B2 FW B3 FW B4, Fixture FW B4, Fixture EW FW EW B3 1st Torsion FW B5 EW B4 FW B6 2nd Torsion FW B7, Tors. FW B7, Tors. EW B5 FW FW B7, EW B8, Torsion 3.36 5.24 11.40 22.42 28.44 45.50 52.26 53.37 58.29 80.01 83.54 107.37 118.25 143.47 150.29 156.21 169.61 184.11 3.83 5.27 11.44 22.52 28.85 48.92 56.52 79.96 81.84 106.85 115.77 143.45 150.12 154.18 168.30 183.02 Percent diff. 12.1 0.5 0.4 0.4 1.4 7.0 3.1 0.1 2.1 0.5 2.1 0.0 0.1 1.3 0.8 0.6 3 SVD Constraints fn CMS 3.84 5.28 11.64 22.77 29.54 50.26 56.96 79.97 83.90 107.01 119.75 143.54 154.12 159.09 182.97 % Diff 12.4% 0.7% 2.1% 1.6% 3.7% 9.5% 2.3% 0.0% 0.4% 0.3% 1.2% 0.0% 2.5% 6.6% 0.6%

Shapes of 6th & 7th Modes before CMS and 6th Mode after CMS 0.4 0.3 0.2 Mode Shape 0.1 0 -0.1 -0.2 -0.3 4.5 Leading Edge Trailing Edge

CMS M6

M6 M7

3.5

2.5

1.5

0.5

x-Position
Fig. 11. Selected mode shapes of wind turbine blade as identied from the measurements and after constraining the base with CMS: (open circles) Mode 7 Identied, (closed circles) Mode 6 Identied, (solid) Mode 7 after CMS. Blue corresponds to the measurements on the leading edge of the blade and green to the trailing edge. (For interpretation of the references to color in this gure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

three modes in the measurements due the xture dynamics, so two and three constraints were applied based on the dominant singular vectors. The frequencies obtained by the CMS procedure are also shown in Table 4, as well as the percent difference between them and the corresponding natural frequency of the system before applying the constraints. After applying three constraints, two of the modes between 45 and 54 Hz disappear, leaving only one mode in that frequency band with a natural frequency of 50.26 Hz. The mode shape of that mode is shown in Fig. 11. The resulting shape is quite similar to both of the 6th and 7th modes, although the scale is different and there are signicant differences in the three shapes near the root of the blade. The 6th and 7th identied modes show signicant displacement near the root, while the displacement is near zero in the mode that was produced by CMS. The 15th and 16th identied modes were also found to merge when three SVD constraints were applied, and the resulting mode shape seemed to be a plausible 7th apwise bending mode .

M.S. Allen et al. / Journal of Sound and Vibration 330 (2011) 44134428

4427

5. Conclusions This work presented a new method of estimating the xed-base modes of a structure from measurements with the structure attached to a exible xture. The proposed approach was validated using experimental measurements from a simple platebeam system. A nite element model of that system was also created to determine how the method would perform if the experiments were perfect. The comparison between the nite element and the experimental results suggests that the proposed method is quite robust to errors in the measurements, which is important since some level of error is unavoidable in experimental modal analysis. The method approximates the motion of a xture as a sum of modal motions, and then constrains each modal motion to ground. For the system considered here, the results were always qualitatively reasonable even if far too few constraints were used, and the delity of the prediction increased as the number of constraints increased. For example, the plate beam system had pairs of modes where the motion of the beam and plate was highly coupled, those modes merged smoothly to a single mode near the true natural frequency as the number of constraints increased. On the other hand, one must remember that each constraint eliminates a mode of the xture subsystem, so physically meaningful modes may be constrained away if too many constraints are used. When the proposed methods were applied to the plate beam system, there were still moderate errors in the predictions of the xed-base natural frequencies near this limit. The analysis revealed that those errors were caused by modal truncation, which was exacerbated by the fact that the plate deforms locally near the point where the beam is connected. This can and should be addressed by designing the experimental xturing to spread out the load near the connection point. Some metrics were presented that can be used to detect this issue, and so they should be used to check the validity of the CMS predictions when applying this technique to real systems. In any event, the beam plate problem represents a demanding application in which the xture was not very stiff relative to the substructure of interest. In most applications, such as the wind turbine blade studied here, this will not be the case. In any event, the results presented here suggest that this is a simple and effective method for estimating the xed-base modes of real structures from experimental measurements.

Acknowledgements This work was supported in part by Sandia National Laboratories. Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energys National Nuclear Security Administration under Contract DE-AC04-94AL85000. The authors also wish to thank Scott Miller for his efforts in helping to design and perform initial tests on the plate beam system. Appendix A Table A1 shows the natural frequencies of the experimental plate beam system compared with the natural frequencies of the FEA model described in Section 3.2. The MAC and modal scale factor between the mode shapes is also shown for all but the 9th mode, which did not correspond to any of the modes of the FEA model.

Table A1 Comparison of experimentally measured natural frequencies with those from the nite element model. Mode 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 Experiment 130.66 224.0 628.3 693.8 902.4 1254.4 1350.2 1657.8 1770.7 1797.8 1906.1 2311.9 2995.7 3107.7 3233.0 3424.5 3522.8 3845.5 FEA model 126.34 207.2 631.0 688.8 899.3 1207.9 1349.2 1641.3 None 1786.1 1895.3 2316.9 2996.3 3119.9 3255.6 3383.8 3552.2 3836.6 MAC 0.9966 0.9960 0.9928 0.9942 0.9655 0.9676 0.9266 0.9675 0.9586 0.9893 0.9765 0.9713 0.9800 0.9617 0.9681 0.9752 0.9704 MSF 1.03 1.01 0.98 1.04 1.06 0.91 1.05 1.06 0.74 0.98 1.08 1.10 1.03 0.99 1.48 0.91 0.73

4428

M.S. Allen et al. / Journal of Sound and Vibration 330 (2011) 44134428

References
[1] M.A. Blair, Space station module prototype modal tests: xed base alternatives, Kissimmee, FL, USA, 1993, pp. 965971. [2] R.L. Mayes, L.D. Bridgers, Extracting xed base modal models from vibration tests on exible tables, 27th International Modal Analysis Conference (IMAC XXVII), Orlando, FL, 2009. [3] D. de Klerk, D.J. Rixen, S.N. Voormeeren, General framework for dynamic substructuring: history, review, and classication of techniques, AIAA Journal 46 (2008) 11691181. [4] D.J. Ewins, Modal Testing: Theory, Practice and Application, Research Studies Press, Baldock, England, 2000. [5] A.P.V.. Urgueira, Dynamic Analysis of Coupled Structures Using Experimental Data, PhD Thesis, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of London, London, 1989. [6] M.S. Allen, R.L. Mayes, Comparisn of FRF and modal methods for combining experimental and analytical substructures, 25th International Modal Analysis Conference (IMAC XXV), Orlando, FL, 2007. [7] M.S. Allen, R.L. Mayes, E.J. Bergman, Experimental modal substructuring to couple and uncouple substructures with exible xtures and multi-point connections, Journal of Sound and Vibration 329 (2010) 48914906. [8] R.L. Mayes, P.S. Hunter, T.W. Simmermacher, M.S. Allen, Combining experimental and analytical substructures with multiple connections, 26th International Modal Analysis Conference (IMAC XXVI), Orlando, FL, 2008. [9] P. Sjovall, T. Abrahamsson, Substructure system identication from coupled system test data, Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 22 (2008) 1533. [10] W. DAmbrogio, A. Fregolent, Decoupling procedures in the general framework of frequency based substructuring, 27th International Modal Analysis Conference (IMAC XXVII), Orlando, FL, 2009. [11] W. DAmbrogio, A. Fregolent, The role of interface DoFs in decoupling of substructures based on the dual domain decomposition, Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 24 (2010) 20352048. [12] R.R.J. Craig, Substructure methods in vibration, Journal of Mechanical Design, Transactions of the ASME 117B (1995) 207213. [13] R.R.J. Craig, M.C.C. Bampton, Coupling of substructures using component mode synthesis, AIAA Journal 6 (1968) 13131319. [14] R.H. MacNeal, A hybrid method of component mode synthesis, Computers & Structures 1 (1971) 581601. [15] S.W. Doebling, L.D. Peterson, Computing statically complete exibility from dynamically measured exibility, Journal of Sound and Vibration 205 (1997) 631645. [16] S. Rubin, Improved component-mode representation for structural dynamic analysis, AIAA Journal 13 (1975) 9951006. [17] D.R. Martinez, T.G. Carne, D.L. Gregory, A.K. Miller, Combined experimental/analytical modeling using component mode synthesis, AIAA/ASME/ASCE/AHS Structures, Structural Dynamics & Materials Conference, Palm Springs, CA, USA, 1984, pp. 140152. [18] A. Butland, P. Avitabile, A reduced order, test veried component mode synthesis approach for system modeling applications, Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 24 (2010) 904921. [19] S. Goldenberg, M. Shapiro, A study of modal coupling procedures for the space shuttle, NASA, 1972. [20] H. Kanda, M.L. Wei, R.J. Allemang, D.L. Brown, Structural dynamic modication using mass additive technique, Fourth International Modal Analysis Conference (IMAC IV), Los Angeles, CA, 1986. [21] Q. Zhang, R.J. Allemang, D.L. Brown, Modal lter: concept and applications, Eighth International Modal Analysis Conference (IMAC VIII), Kissimmee, FL, 1990, pp. 487496. [22] J.H. Ginsberg, Mechanical and Structural Vibrations, rst ed, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 2001. [23] T.G. Carne, D. Todd Grifth, M.E. Casias, Support conditions for experimental modal analysis, Sound and Vibration 41 (2007) 1016. [24] M.S. Allen, R.L. Mayes, Estimating the degree of nonlinearity in transient responses with zeroed early-time fast Fourier transforms, Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 24 (2010) 20492064. [26] M.S. Allen, J.H. Ginsberg, A global, single-input-multi-output (SIMO) implementation of the algorithm of mode isolation and applications to analytical and experimental data, Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing 20 (2006) 10901111. [27] M.S. Allen, J.H. Ginsberg, Global, hybrid, MIMO implementation of the algorithm of mode isolation, 23rd International Modal Analysis Conference (IMAC XXIII), Orlando, FL, 2005. [28] M.S. Allen, J.H. Ginsberg, Modal identication of the Z24 bridge using MIMO-AMI, 23rd International Modal Analysis Conference (IMAC XXIII), Orlando, FL, 2005. [29] P. Ind, The Non-Intrusive Modal Testing of Delicate and Critical Structures, PhD Thesis, Imperial College of Science, Technology & Medicine, University of London, London, 2004. [30] M. Imregun, D.A. Robb, D.J. Ewins, Structural modication and coupling dynamic analysis using measured FRF data, Fifth International Modal Analysis Conference (IMAC V), London, England, 1987.