Identification of damping in MDOF systems using time-scale decomposition

A method of damping identification in multi-degree-of-freedom systems is presented. The method is based on the time-scale decomposition of the system impulse response. The continuous wavelet transform is used to decompose the impulse response into the time-scale domain. Three techinques based on the wavelet transform are used to estimate damping. These are the wavelet transform cross-section procedure, the impulse response recovery procedure based on wavelet domain filtering and the wavelet ridge detection procedure. The methods are applied to simulated multi-degree-of-freedom systems. (C) 1997 Academic Press Limited.