Dynamics of a Flexible Roof Test Model under Ambient Vibrations Measurements

Flexible roofs are sensitive to wind actions because they are light, and their deformability can induce local or global instability. In most cases, their design requires experimental wind tunnel testing to investigate the aeroelastic phenomena and the structural response under the wind. However, the reduced scale necessary in wind tunnels makes the dynamic identification of the test model difficult. Several approaches of multi-modal dynamic identification can be used, even if a specific approach is not defined for geometric nonlinear flexible roofs. Many times, the choice of the position of the sensors is affected by the unknown roof dynamics. This paper investigates the ambient vibration time-dependent accelerations for a flexible roof scaled model through Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and their spatial correlations with the purpose of analyzing the signal structure and its acquisition to perform the dynamic identification of the test model.