Accurate monitoring of time-varying cable force plays a vital role in the condition assessment of cables. However, most current methods for identifying the cable force can only provide an average cable force over a period. The vibration method correlates the cable force with cable frequency via a formula, transforming the time-varying cable force identification into the instantaneous frequency (IF) identification of the cable. Synchroextracting transform (SET) is a powerful time-frequency method with the ability to identify the cable’s IF from the measured response. However, the performance of SET in identifying the IF is heavily influenced by the choice of window length, limiting its practical application. In this study, an improved SET (ISET) is proposed to overcome this limitation and is utilized to identify the time-varying force in bridge cables. In ISET, the variational mode decomposition is first employed to decompose the measured response into several mono-component modes. A hyperparameter optimization algorithm, adopting Rényi entropy as the evaluation index, is then introduced to determine the optimal window length for each mono-component mode. Furthermore, the proposed ISET with the optimal window length is used to identify the cable’s IF, thereby calculating the time-varying cable force using the vibration method formula. Cases involving finite element model of the cable, along with laboratory experiments on a scaled cable, show that the proposed method successfully addresses the limitations of SET and accurately identifies time-varying cable force. Finally, to validate the practicality of the proposed method, the field test data from an unsymmetric cable-stayed bridge is adopted. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is straightforward and efficient, capable of accurately monitoring the time-varying cable force in both new and existing cables of cable-stayed bridges.
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