APPLICATION OF THE CONDITIONED REVERSE PATH METHOD

Abstract Conventional frequency response estimations often give results contaminated by the presence of non-linearities and the extraction of underlying linear system properties is thus difficult. To overcome this problem, the implementation of the Conditioned Reverse Path spectral method to the identification of single- and multi-degree-of-freedom (sdof and mdof) non-linear systems is considered, showing that conventional methods such as ‘H1’ and ‘H2’ lead to estimated frequency response functions which are often completely inadequate, even in absence of measurement noise. This spectral method allows to estimate the coefficients of the non-linearities away from the location of the applied excitations and also to identify the linear dynamic compliance matrix when the number of excitations is smaller than the number of response locations. This paper presents some guidelines to successfully apply this method to real non-linear systems; furthermore, the results from an experimental test over a sdof suspension system are shown.