Time domain responses of a prestressed beam and prestress identification

The time-domain response of a prestressed Euler-Bernoulli beam under external excitation is studied based on modal superposition. The prestress force is then identified in the time domain by a system identification approach and Tikhonov regularization technique is used to provide bounds to the ill-conditioned results in the identified problem. Both measured displacements and strains are used. The noise effect is improved using the orthogonal polynomial function, and cases with either sinusoidal or impulsive excitations are illustrated to give very good results from the lower three measured modes and data obtained from three measurement points. Work in this paper demonstrates the feasibility of indirectly identifying the prestress force in a beam.