Floquet Experimental Modal Analysis for System Identification of Linear Time-periodic Systems

A variety of systems can be faithfully modeled as linear with coefficients that vary periodically with time or Linear Time-Periodic (LTP). Examples include anisotropic rotorbearing systems, wind turbines, satellite systems, etc... A number of powerful techniques have been presented in the past few decades, so that one might expect to model or control an LTP system with relative ease compared to time varying systems in general. However, few, if any, methods exist for experimentally characterizing LTP systems. This work seeks to produce a set of tools that can be used to characterize LTP systems completely through experiment. While such an approach is commonplace for LTI systems, all current methods for time varying systems require either that the system parameters vary slowly with time or else simply identify a few parameters of a pre-defined model to response data. A previous work presented two methods by which system identification techniques for linear time invariant (LTI) systems could be used to identify a response model for an LTP system from free response data. One of these allows the system’s model order to be determined exactly as if the system were linear timeinvariant. This work presents a means whereby the response model identified in the previous work can be used to generate the full state transition matrix and the underlying time varying state matrix from an identified LTP response model and illustrates the entire system-identification process using simulated response data for a Jeffcott rotor in anisotropic bearings.