Nonlinear Characteristics Identification of an Impacting System

This work aims to develop a new method for estimating the stiffness of linear constraint of a single-degree-of-freedom impacting system. It was done by studying its free vibration response through extracting backbone curves by using the zero-crossing method. Efficacy of the proposed approach was demonstrated by comparing the backbone curves obtained from simulations and experiments. Both results showed different backbone curves under a variety of stiffnesses, where larger impacting stiffness may lead to a measurable lowering of the backbone curve, and the effective stiffness of the entire system can be estimated quantitatively.