Natural frequencies identification of subgrade for high-speed railway based on empirical mode decomposition

Natural frequencies identification is important for dynamic analysis of subgrade for high-speed railway. The most commonly used method is analyzing the response spectrum feature undergoing ambient excitation directly without any processing. However, this method requires that the ambient excitation should be close to the white signal. If the ambient excitation includes some kinds of non-white signals, this method becomes hard to use. In this paper, based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method and random vibration theory, an improved identification method undergoing ambient excitation is proposed. First, the self-correlation function of an acceleration record is decomposed into several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) via EMD method. Then natural frequencies are determined by Hilbert transform and basic modal analysis theory. The original acceleration records from the Wu-Guang Passenger Dedicated Railway are processed by the proposed method to identify natural frequencies of the subgrade. The identification results are compared with results from the field excitation tests and finite element analysis. Comparisons demonstrate that the proposed method is reliable to identify natural frequencies of subgrade for high-speed railway. The natural frequencies of the test subgrade are at low level.