Parametric Identification of Nonlinear Vibration Systems Via Polynomial Chirplet Transform

The response of a nonlinear oscillator is characterized by its instantaneous amplitude (IA) and instantaneous frequency (IF) features, which can be significantly affected by the physical properties of the system. Accordingly, the system properties could be inferred from the IA and IF of its response if both instantaneous features can be identified accurately. To fulfill such an idea, a nonlinear system parameter identification method is proposed in this paper with the aid of polynomial chirplet transform (PCT), which has been proved a powerful tool for processing nonstationary signals. First, the PCT is used to extract the instantaneous characteristics, i.e., IA and IF, from nonlinear system responses. Second, instantaneous modal parameters estimation was adopted to extract backbone and damping curves, which characterize the inherent nonlinearities of the system. Third, the physical property parameters of the system were estimated through fitting the identified average nonlinear characteristic curves. Finally, the proposed nonlinear identification method is experimentally validated through comparing with two Hilbert transform (HT) based methods.