Signal processing for time domain analysis of impact hammer test data

The impact-hammer test is a widely known non-destructive vibration testing method to extract the modal parameters of a dynamic system. Due to the fast development of computing, timedomain analysis for data interpretation is now receiving increased attention. To provide normalised and denoised data, appropriate signal processing is indispensable. This paper presents a practical study on data normalisation and denoising. Specifically, discrete wavelet transform (DWT) denoising filter and weighted moving average (WMA) filter are applied in sequence for denoising. The signal processing results on the impact hammer test of a steel frame are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.