Determination of mode shapes using wavelet transform of free vibration data

In this article, a new method is proposed to determine the mode shapes of linear dynamic systems with proportional viscous damping excited by an impact force. The time signals of responses and a priori knowledge of the natural frequencies are required in this method. The method is particularly suitable for the wavelet techniques which can precisely estimate the natural frequencies. A previously proposed method based on a modified Morlet wavelet function with an adjusting parameter is used to identify the natural frequencies and damping ratios of system, and the mode shapes are estimated using the proposed method in this work. It is shown that the extracted mode shapes are not scaled. Therefore, mass change method is used for scaling the mode shapes. Moreover, the effect of noise on the extracted modal parameters is investigated. The validity of method is demonstrated using numerical and experimental case studies.