The identification of a dam's modal parameters under random support excitation based on the Hankel matrix joint approximate diagonalization technique

• We analyzed the vibration of dam under support excitation using state space model.
• We proposed a new operation modal analysis method for the dam.
• The trend is a decrease in natural frequencies of dam with increasing water level.

Modal analysis is an effective method for monitoring a dam's health. Modal parameters can be identified from the measured vibration response of a dam under ambient excitation, such as that from an earthquake. In this paper, we first use the state space model to analyze the vibration of a dam under ambient support excitation and conclude that the nature excitation technique (NExT) can be used to the measured absolute acceleration response of the dam under band-limited stochastic support excitation to obtain its impulse response. To overcome some of the limitations of the traditional modal identification method for a structure under ambient excitation, we propose a modal parameter identification method based on the Hankel matrix joint approximate diagonalization (HJAD) technique. In this method, the Hankel matrix is defined as the covariance matrix of a vector, which is composed of measured acceleration responses, and their time-lagged data. This modal parameter identification method can be regarded as an improvement to the traditional time domain method because it introduces the joint approximate diagonalization (JAD) technique into the original method. On the other hand, the method can be regarded as an improvement to the SOBI-based modal identification method because it uses the Hankel matrix instead of the covariance matrix of response to perform the JAD. Therefore, this method combines the advantages of the two existing modal identification methods and overcomes some of their limitations. Compared with the SOBI-based modal parameter identification method, the implementation of the method presented in this paper is very convenient because we need only to add time-lagged response data to the analysis. The numerical analysis results show that the proposed modal parameter identification method based on HJAD technology not only has the advantage of a traditional blind modal parameter identification algorithm, but can also overcome the limitation of not being able to estimate more active modes than the number of available sensors. According to the satisfactory performance of this method in the analysis of strong-motion earthquake observation data for a gravity dam, the modal parameter identification method proposed in this paper has the potential for application in water conservancy engineering.