The vibration signals are usually assumed to be stationary for the sake of simplicity, but actually many signals are not definitely stationary, and ignoring the non-stationary characteristics of signals may affect the follow-up analysis directly. Therefore, proper evaluation of the non-stationarity of the analyzed signal is an inevitable and very important preprocessing procedure. In this paper, a recurrence quantification analysis-based signal non-stationarity assessment method using the recurrence plot, a time–time plane, is presented. The aiming of this method is to quantify the non-stationarity of structural operational vibration signals, and extract the non-stationary sensitive features of structural operational vibration signal from its recurrence plot. Hence various recurrence patterns in the recurrence plot are studied, of which different patterns indicate that the signals have different characters. Drift and disruption represent the signal non-stationarity. The drifted pattern means that the signal contains a trend or drift, and the disrupted pattern means that sudden changes occurred in the signal. Meanwhile, variation rules of local recurrence density in the recurrence plots caused by those non-stationarity patterns, are discussed. Afterwards, based on the variation of local recurrence density and Taguchi’s quality loss function, a new non-stationarity measurement, named recurrence loss value, is proposed. Then the comparison between the existing measurement recurrence trend and the proposed measurement recurrence loss value is conducted. Results show that the recurrence trend is mainly sensitive to the drift, and the recurrence loss value is not only sensitive to the disruption but also effective to the drift. Finally, the proposed measurement is further verified by assessing the non-stationarity of structural operational vibration signals. Those examples have demonstrated that the recurrence loss value has a promising feasibility in the practical engineering application.

为了简单起见，通常将振动信号假定为固定的，但实际上许多信号并非绝对固定的，并且忽略信号的非平稳特性可能会直接影响后续分析。因此，对分析信号的非平稳性进行正确评估是不可避免且非常重要的预处理程序。在本文中，提出了一种基于递归量化分析的信号非平稳性评估方法，该方法使用了递归图（时间-时间平面）。该方法的目的是量化结构运行振动信号的非平稳性，并从其递归图中提取结构运行振动信号的非平稳敏感特征。因此，研究了重复图中的各种重复模式，其中不同的模式表示信号具有不同的字符。漂移和干扰代表信号不稳定。漂移模式表示信号包含趋势或漂移，而破坏模式表示信号中发生了突然变化。同时，讨论了由那些非平稳模式引起的递归图中局部递归密度的变化规律。然后，根据局部递归密度和田口质量损失函数的变化，提出了一种新的非平稳性度量，称为递归损失值。然后，将现有的测量重复趋势与建议的测量重复损失值进行比较。结果表明，复发趋势主要对漂移敏感，复发损失值不仅对破坏敏感，对漂移也有效。最后，通过评估结构运行振动信号的非平稳性进一步验证了所提出的测量方法。这些例子表明，循环损耗值在实际工程应用中具有广阔的前景。