Identification of fluctuating wind load distribution along the structure’s height inversely by means of structural response

This paper aims at identification of time-varying components of wind loads applied on a guyed mast. The corresponding inverse problem of load identification, when structural response is known, is solved by means of Tikhonov regularization method while L-curve assists in finding the regularization parameter. The proposed strategy of this research is to identify the wind load distribution of the Test-Analysis Model (TAM), corresponding to the guyed mast. There are two fundamental reasons underlying this proposal: Firstly the number of measurement points is usually much less than the number of degrees of freedom and secondly wind load has a continuous distribution acting on all elements of structure, as such identification of it’s real distribution is not feasible in a large scale. The validity of the identified load is evaluated based on the comparison between the measured structural response and the displacements from the identified loads. Numerical simulations show that for low noise level in measurements the identified wind loads are in a good agreement with the actual loads and also the responses of unmeasured locations can be recovered with a good accuracy.