Output only structural modal identification using matrix pencil method

Modal parameter identification has received much attention recently for their usefulness in earthquake engineering, damage detection and structural health monitoring. The identification method based on Matrix Pencil technique is adopted in this paper to identify structural modal parameters, such as natural frequencies, damping ratios and modal shapes using impulse vibration responses. This method can also be applied to dynamic responses induced by stationary and white-noise inputs since the auto- and cross- correlation function of the two outputs has the same form as the impulse response dynamic functions. Matrix Pencil method is very robust to noise contained in the measurement data. It has a lower variance of estimates of the parameters of interest than the Polynomial Method, and is also computationally more efficient. The numerical simulation results show that this technique can identify modal parameters accurately even if the noise level is high.