A new method for selection of reference coordinates in operational modal testing of structures

One of the drawbacks of the operational modal analysis techniques is that there is no possibility of measurement of the responses in all required points، which is attributed to the limitations of either the number of accelerometers or the number of measurement channels. To overcome this shortcoming، an experiment should be performed in different steps and relations between these steps of the experiment are determined by selection of some specific points as reference points. Existing techniques use the correlation between measurement points to determine the reference points in which an increase in the environmental noise leads to the incapability of the method. In this paper، a new index for selection of reference points is introduced which is more efficient in the noisy environments. To evaluate the proposed method numerically، a comparison has been drawn between the results of this method and correlation approaches using a FE model of a beam. To validate the method، an experiment has been conducted on a steel plate. Obtained results from numerical and experimental cases show that the proposed index is more capable in reference point selection and calculation of the modal parameters of the structures comparing to the results of correlation method.