A data-driven, energy-based approach for identifying equations of motion in vibrating structures directly from measurements

Determining the underlying equations of motion and parameter values for vibrating structures is of great concern in science and engineering. This work introduces a new data-driven approach called the energy-based dual-phase dynamics identification (EDDI) method for identifying the nonlinear dynamics of single-degree-of-freedom oscillators. The EDDI method leverages the energies of the system to identify the governing dynamics through the forces acting on the oscillator. The approach consists of two phases: a model-dissipative and model-stiffness identification. In the first phase, the fact that kinetic and mechanical energies are equivalent when the displacement is zero is leveraged to compute the energy dissipated and a corresponding model for the nonlinear damping of the system. In the second phase, the energy dissipated is used to compute the mechanical energy (ME), which is then used to obtain a reformulated Lagrangian. The conservative forces acting on the oscillator are then computed by taking the derivative the Lagrangian, then a model for the nonlinear stiffness is identified by solving a system of linear equations. The resulting governing equations are identified by including both the nonlinear damping and stiffness terms. A key novelty of the EDDI method is that the only thing required to perform the identification is free-response measurements and the mass of the oscillator. No prior understanding of the dynamics of the system is necessary to identify the underlying dynamics, such that the EDDI method is a truly data-driven method. The method is demonstrated using simulated and measured responses of nonlinear single-degree-of-freedom systems with a variety of nonlinear mechanisms.