Modal identification using the frequency-scale domain decomposition technique of ambient vibration responses

This paper proposes a new modal identification method of ambient vibration responses. The application of the singular value decomposition to continuous wavelet transform of power spectral density matrix gives singular values and singular vectors in frequency-scale domain. Analytical development shows a direct relation between local maxima in frequency-scale representation of singular values and modal parameters. This relation is then carried on for the identification of modal parameters via a complete practical procedure. The main novelties of this work involve the new formulation in frequency-scale domain and the capacity for the identification of modal parameters without the step of ridges extraction in comparison with previous wavelet-based modal identification methods.