Identification of vibration sources

The problem addressed is the identification of force distributions exciting structures from the knowledge of measured flexural displacements. The method, called “Force Analysis Technique” (FAT), is based on the computation of the force distribution, the second member of the equation of motion, which is discretized by a finite difference scheme. Then, the main difficulty associated with this problem comes from the data uncertainties that produce noise in the results. It is shown that the use of Signal Processing tools (spatial windows, wavenumber filters,…) permits the technique to be regularized. The goals of this paper are to formulate briefly the application of FAT and to define the tools adapted for regularizing the approach. Experimental results are presented in order to validate the technique and apply it to industrial problems.