Enhancement of harmonics generation in hysteretic elastic media induced by conditioning

The physical origin of harmonics generation in non classical (hysteretic) elastic media and the mechanisms of energy transfer among harmonics are still not completely understood. Furthermore the well known conditioning effect observed in such materials is known to have a significant influence on the elastic response of consolidated granular media and damaged composites and metals. Here, we show that the elastic non linearity of samples belonging to these two categories increases after having been excited with a relatively low amplitude stress. The observed behaviours could be described by activation features intrinsically present in phenomenological multistate models proposed in the literature.