Reproduction of vibration patterns of elastic structures by block-wise modal expansion method (BMEM)

The quality of vibration pattern reproduction of elastic structures by the modal expansion method is influenced by the modal expansion method and the sensor placement as well as the accuracy of measured natural modes and the total number of vibration sensors. In this context, this paper presents an improved numerical method for reproducing the vibration patterns by introducing a block-wise modal expansion method (BMEM), together with the genetic algorithm (GA). For a given number of vibration sensors, the sensor positions are determined by an evolutionary optimization using GA and the modal assurance criterion (MAC). Meanwhile, for the proposed block-wise modal expansion, a whole frequency range of interest is divided into several overlapped frequency blocks and the vibration field reproduction is made block by block with different natural modes and different modal participation factors. A hollow cylindrical tank is taken to illustrate the proposed improved modal expansion method. Through the numerical experiments, the proposed method is compared with several conventional methods to justify that the proposed method provides the improved results.