Identification of uncertain vibrating beams through a perturbation approach

Uncertainty characterization plays a key role in the safety assessment of many engineering structures. Nevertheless, the inverse problem for structures with uncertain parameters has received less attention than the relevant direct one, since one deals with stochastic structural system identification. This paper discusses the dynamic identification of linear structural systems with random stiffness parameters. Following a perturbation approach, recently proposed by the authors in a discrete framework, an identification technique for transversely vibrating 1-D uncertain continua is proposed. Results for a paradigmatic case, a simply supported beam, are presented and discussed. (C) 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.