Identification of a continuous structure with a geometrical non-linearity. Part I: Conditioned reverse path method

Particular effort has been spent in the field of identification of multi-degree-of-freedom non-linear systems. The newly developed methods permit the structural analyst to consider increasingly complex systems. The aim of this paper and a companion paper is to study, by means of two methods, a continuous non-linear system consisting of an experimental cantilever beam with a geometrical non-linearity. In this paper (Part I), the ability of the conditioned reverse path method, which is a frequency domain technique, to identify the behaviour of this structure is assessed. The companion paper (Part II) is devoted to the application of proper orthogonal decomposition, which is an updating technique, to the test example.