Extraction of normal modes from contaminated measurement with noise for highly coupled structures

A frequency-domain technique to extract the normal mode shapes from the contaminated FRF measurements for highly coupled structures is developed. The relation between the complex FRFs and the normal mode shapes is derived. It is found that the normal mode shape cannot be extracted exactly from the complex mode shape. However, an exact relation between the normal made shape and the complex FRF does exist. In the present method, only the magnitude and phase data at the undamped natural frequencies are utilized to extract the normal mode shapes. Hence, the effects of measurement noise can be reduced. A numerical example is employed to illustrate the applicability of the technique. The results indicate that this technique can successfully extract the normal modes from the noisy frequency response functions of a highly coupled structure.