EXPERIMENTAL VALIDATION OF THE CONSTANT LEVEL METHOD FOR IDENTIFICATION OF NON-LINEAR MULTI-DEGREE-OF-FREEDOM SYSTEMS

System identification for non-linear dynamical systems could find use in many applications such as condition monitoring, finite element model validation and determination of stability. The effectiveness of existing non-linear system identification techniques is limited by various factors such as the complexity of the system under investigation and the type of non-linearities present. In this work, the constant level identification approach, which can identify multi-degree-of-freedom systems featuring any type of non-linear function, including discontinuous functions, is validated experimentally. The method is shown to identify accurately an experimental dynamical system featuring two types of stiffness non-linearity. The full equations of motion are also extracted accurately, even in the presence of a discontinuous non-linearity.