Nonlinear ground vibration identification of an F-16 aircraft - Part 1: Fast nonparametric analysis of distortions in FRF measurements

Although they are generally modelled as linear systems, aircraft structures are known to be prone to nonlinear phenomena. A specific challenge encountered with fighter aircraft, besides aeroelastic nonlinearity, is the modelling of the wing-to-payload mounting interfaces. For large amplitudes of vibration, friction and gaps may be triggered in these connections and markedly impact the dynamic behaviour of the complete structure. In this series of two papers, the nonlinear dynamics of an F-16 aircraft is investigated using rigorous methods applied to real data collected during a ground vibration test campaign. The present work focuses on the detection, qualification and quantification of nonlinear distortions affecting frequency response function (FRF) measurements. The key idea of the approach
is to excite the structure using a random signal with a user-defined amplitude spectrum, where only a set of well-selected frequencies is different from zero in the band of interest. It is demonstrated that this careful choice of the input frequencies allows, without any further user interaction, to quantify the importance of odd and even nonlinear distortions in the output spectra with respect to the noise level. At high excitation amplitude, the F-16 dynamics is found to exhibit substantial odd nonlinearities and less significant, yet not negligible, even nonlinearities.