Online Dynamic Load Identification Based on Extended Kalman Filter for Structures with Varying Parameters

Dynamic load identification is an inverse problem concerned with finding the load applied on a structure when the dynamic characteristics and the response of the structure are known. In engineering applications, some of the structure parameters such as the mass or the stiffness may be unknown and/or may change in time. In this paper, an online dynamic load identification algorithm based on an extended Kalman filter is proposed. The algorithm not only identifies the load by measuring the structural response but also identifies the unknown structure parameters and tracks their changes. We discuss the proposed algorithm for the cases when the unknown parameters are the stiffness or the mass coefficients. Furthermore, for a system with many degrees of freedom and to achieve online computations, we implement the model reduction theory. Thus, we reduce the number of degrees of freedom in the resulting symmetric system before applying the proposed extended Kalman filter algorithm. The algorithm is used to recover the dynamic loads in three numerical examples. It is also used to identify the dynamic load in a lab experiment for a structure with varying parameters. The simulations and the experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is effective and can simultaneously identify the parameters and any changes in them as well as the applied dynamic load.