Vibration Based Structural Health Monitoring: A Real Case Study Framed into Cultural Heritage

Vibration based Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is increasingly used to monitor modal parameters of structures, i.e. natural frequencies, damping coefficients and mode shapes. Operational Modal Analysis (OMA) methods are very attractive since they are cheap and totally non-destructive. Furthermore, they allow to perform SHM when the structure is under operative conditions, i.e. when the structural input, due to ambient vibrations, is not known. In this paper anOMAmethod based on the Hilbert transform is used to perform a real world application of vibration based SHM. Particularly, the case study of a cultural heritage structure located in Palermo is analysed in detail also considering comparisons with other OMA methods for SHM.