Evaluating dynamic loads in real time is crucial for health monitoring, fault diagnosis and fatigue analysis in aerospace, automotive and earthquake engineering among other vibration related applications. Developing such algorithms can be vital for several safety and performance functionalities. Therefore, over the past few years the identification of dynamic loads has attracted a lot of attention; however, little literature on the online identification can be found. In this paper, we propose

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... online-identification method of structural dynamic loads so that the dynamic load is evaluated in real time and while the system response is still being measured. This is achieved by significantly improving the identification efficiency while retaining a high accuracy. The proposed method which is based on Kalman filter, is introduced in detail for a finite as well as an infinite number of degrees of freedom. Starting from an initial guess of the state vector we evaluate the error covariance, which then helps to identify the value of the excitation force using a weighted least square method and minimizing the covariance unbiased estimation. This is repeated at certain time intervals i.e., time steps where the state vector is updated in real time as acceleration measurements are updated. The feasibility of the method is validated using numerical simulations and an experimental verification where a detailed LabVIEW (National Instruments Ltd.) implementation is provided.