What is the best method for structural damping identification? Part 2: Comparison of performance

Damping identification in structural vibration from measured frequency response functions is a difficult task. Several methods have been proposed in the literature to identify the damping matrix. Some employ modal parameters such as natural frequencies, damping factors, and mode shapes, while others work directly from the frequency response function matrix. In practice, in the presence of noise and incompleteness of data, it is hard to guess how well any of these methods will perform. This paper reports a systematic simulation study to test the relative benefits/disadvantages of a wide range of approaches, existing and novel. Representative model systems have been chosen to test performance under various conditions of measurement noise, system complexity, damping type, modal overlap factor, and modal truncation. A very wide range of results is summarized by computing various norms of performance for all the methods studied. Recommendations are made for the best methods to extract reliable damping informat...