Abstract:It is useful to study directly the general motion of the bridge deck due to ambient wind excitations, especially for the purpose of monitoring the "aeroelastic status" of the structure. In the general motion, a sustained or exponentially modified sinusoidal oscillation is not available and the linear time invariant system assumption as is required by the flutter derivative model (e.g. [1]) is jeopardized. Besides, the existence of uncontrollable factors under operational conditions may also bring about the time varying features. As will be show in this paper, the non-stationarity in the general motion is usually stronger than expected, which may cast a doubt on current practices of applying stationary techniques on ambient vibration analysis. Therefore, it is suitable to have reliable signal processing techniques to pre-examine the measured ambient responses before processing them. In this paper, a joint time-frequency study is carried out, via wind tunnel experiments, on the aeroelastic vibration of a rigid sectional model. Hilbert transform combined with empirical mode decomposition method is used. Instantaneous frequency domain properties of aeroelastic vibrations are obtained. Time dependant features of the interactive system are revealed.The result of this study indicates that, as far as the experiment in this paper is concerned, the nonstationarity is stronger in the vertical and rotational motion than in the lateral motion.