Single point mooring system modal parameter identification based on empirical mode decomposition and time-varying autoregressive model

•A method based on EMD and TVAR model is proposed to identify modal parameter.•We compared the proposed method with HHT and STFT method in two experiments.•Modal analysis of a single point mooring model.•Modal analysis of real FPSO single point mooring system.

A method based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and time-varying autoregressive (TVAR) model is proposed here to identify the modal parameters of time-varying systems, such as the Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) single point mooring system. For the EMD–TVAR method, the original signal is decomposed into a finite number of ‘intrinsic mode functions’ (IMFs) by the EMD. Each IMF can be represented as a TVAR model. Then, the time-varying modal parameters i.e., instantaneous frequency (IF) and modal dumping, can be obtained by the basis functions expansion method. The proposed EMD–TVAR method has good results in two experiments compared with the Huang–Hilbert transformation and Short Time Fourier Transform method, and it has been used to analysis the modal parameters of FPSO single point mooring system successfully. The system's time-varying characteristic and its frequency distribution can be known from the modal analysis results.