Blind source separation towards decentralized modal identification using compressive sampling

Wireless sensing technology has gained significant attention in the field of structural health monitoring (SHM). Various decentralized modal identification methods have been developed employing wireless sensors. However, one of themajor bottlenecks - especially dealing with long-term SHM - is the large volume of transmitted data. To overcome this problem, we present compressed sensing as a data reduction preprocessing tool within the framework of blind source separation. The results of source separation are ultimately used for modal identification of linear structures under ambient vibrations. When used together with sparsifying time-frequency decompositions, we show that accurate modal identification results are possible with high compression ratios. The main novelty in the method proposed here is in the application of compressive sensing for decentralized modal identification of civil structures.