The State-of-the-Art on Time-Frequency Signal Processing Techniques for High-Resolution Representation of Nonlinear Systems in Engineering

One of the serious issues of traditional signal processing techniques in analyzing the responses of real-life structures is related to the presentation of fundamental information of nonlinear, non-stationary, and noisy signals with closely-spaced frequencies. To overcome this difficulty, numerous studies have been carried out recently to explore proper time-frequency signal processing techniques to efficiently present high-resolution representations for nonlinear characteristics of analyzed signals. Despite existing extensive reviews on vibration-based signal processing techniques in time and frequency domains for Structural Health Monitoring purposes, there exists no study in categorizing the signal processing techniques based on the feature extraction with time-frequency representations. To fill this gap, this paper presents a comprehensive state-of-the-art review on the applications of time-frequency signal processing techniques for damage detection, localization, and quantification in various structural systems. The progressive trend of time-frequency analysis methods is reviewed by summarizing their advantages and disadvantages, as well as recommendations of combination methods to be utilized for different applications in various complicated structural and mechanical systems.