ABSTRACT
The ability of empirical mode decomposition (EMD) to detect structural damage as it happens has been demonstrated in the literature (Huang & Shen 2005, Xu & Chen 2004,Yang et al. 2004), but it has not been tested for a structure with the measurements derived from the crossing of a moving load. Unlike other available methods, the EMD method has the capability to deal with nonstationary and nonlinear data. The EMD method is based on the assumption that any data consists of different simple intrinsic modes of oscillations. Each intrinsic mode, linear or nonlinear, represents a simple oscillation which has the same number of extrema and zero crossings. The oscillation is also symmetric with respect to the local mean. Each of these oscillatory modes is represented by a Intrinsic Mode Function (IMF).
