Modal testing of nonlinear vibrating structures based on nonlinear normal modes: Experimental demonstration

Realizing that nonlinearity is a frequent occurrence in engineering structures and that linear experimental modal analysis (EMA) is of limited usefulness in this context, the present paper is an attempt to develop nonlinear EMA by targeting the extraction of nonlinear normal modes (NNMs) from time series of nonlinear mechanical systems. Based on a nonlinear extension of phase resonance testing, the proposed methodology excites the structure to isolate a single NNM during the experiments. Thanks to the invariance principle, the energy dependence of that nonlinear mode (i.e., the NNM modal curves and their oscillation frequencies) can be extracted from the resulting free decay response using time-frequency analysis. This paper is devoted to the experimental demonstration and robustness of this procedure. To this end, an experimental cantilever beam with a geometrical nonlinearity is considered, and the ability of the proposed methodology to extract its NNMs from the measured responses is assessed.