Experimental studies on finite element model updating for a heated beam-like structure

An experimental study was made for the identification procedure of time-varying modal parameters and the finite element model updating technique of a beam-like thermal structure in both steady and unsteady high temperature environments. An improved time-varying autoregressive method was proposed first to extract the instantaneous natural frequencies of the structure in the unsteady high temperature environment. Based on the identified modal parameters, then, a finite element model for the structure was updated by using Kriging meta-model and optimization-based finite-element model updating method. The temperature-dependent parameters to be updated were expressed as low-order polynomials of temperature increase, and the finite element model updating problem was solved by updating several coefficients of the polynomials. The experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the time-varying modal parameter identification method and showed that the instantaneous natural frequencies of the updated model well tracked the trends of the measured values with high accuracy.