Vibration source number estimation of a shell structure

It has been challenging to correctly separate the mixed signals into source components when the source number is not known a priori. To reveal the complexity of the measured vibration signals, and provide the priori information for the blind source separation, in this paper, we propose a novel source number estimation based on independent component analysis (ICA) and clustering evaluation analysis, and then carry out experiment studies with typical mechanical vibration signals from a shell structure. The results demonstrate that the proposed ICA based source number estimation performs stably and robustly for the shell structure.