A Two-Step Strategy for System Identification of Civil Structures for Structural Health Monitoring Using Wavelet Transform and Genetic Algorithms

Nowadays, the accurate identification of natural frequencies and damping ratios play an important role in smart civil engineering, since they can be used for seismic design, vibration control, and condition assessment, among others. To achieve it in practical way, it is required to instrument the structure and apply techniques which are able to deal with noise-corrupted and non-linear signals, as they are common features in real-life civil structures. In this article, a two-step strategy is proposed for performing accurate modal parameters identification in an automated manner. In the first step, it is obtained and decomposed the measured signals using the natural excitation technique and the synchrosqueezed wavelet transform, respectively. Then, the second step estimates the modal parameters by solving an optimization problem employing a genetic algorithm-based approach, where the micropopulation concept is used to improve the speed convergence as well as the accuracy of the estimated values. The accuracy and effectiveness of the proposal are tested using both the simulated response of a benchmark structure and the measurements of a real eight-story building. The obtained results show that the proposed strategy can estimate the modal parameters accurately, indicating than the proposal can be considered as an alternative to perform the abovementioned task.