Tips, Tricks, and Obscure Features for Modal Signal Processing

In the early days of modal testing, when data acquisition channels were precious and few, time data was often tape-recorded and then postprocessed into the frequency domain. Nowadays, our data acquisition hardware can measure a large number of channels and the software can perform data processing concurrently such that the measurements are conveniently available as soon as the test run is complete. However, there are some advantages to the old ways. This chapter extols the virtues of keeping the time response data measured during a modal test and discusses some obscure signal processing features that could be helpful in improving the quality of your frequency response functions.