Deriving mechanical structures in physical coordinates from data-driven state-space realizations

In this article, the problem of deriving a physical model of a mechanical structure from an arbitrary state-space realization is addressed. As an alternative to finite element formulations, the physical parameters of a model may be directly obtained from identified parametric models. However, these methods are limited by the number of available sensors and often lead to poor predictive models. Additionally, the most efficient identification algorithms retrieve models where the physical parameters are hidden. This last difficulty is known in the literature as the inverse vibration problem. In this work, an approach to the inverse vibration problem is proposed. It is based on a similarity transformation and the requirement that every degree of freedom should contain a sensor and an actuator (full instrumented system) is relaxed to a sensor or an actuator per degree of freedom, with at least one co-located pair (partially instrumented system). The physical parameters are extracted from a state-space realization of the former system. It is shown that this system has a symmetric transfer function and this symmetry is exploited to derive a state-space realization from an identified model of the partially instrumented system. A subspace continuous-time system identification algorithm previously proposed by the authors in [1] is used to estimate this model from the IO data.