Identification of an experimental nonlinear energy sink device using the unscented Kalman filter

•Self-validating implementations of the UKF over-fit to the identification signal.•Cross-validating implementations of the UKF robustly identify the system model.•Global sensitivity analysis techniques can inform the identification process. Nonlinear energy sink (NES) devices have recently been introduced as a means of passive structural control and have been shown to effectively dissipate energy from structural systems during extreme vibrations. Due to their essential geometric nonlinearities, time domain based methods are often applied for identifying their system parameters, which is a challenging task. The unscented Kalman filter (UKF) has been shown in numerical studies to be robust to highly nonlinear systems with noisy data and therefore presents a promising option for identification. In this study, the UKF is used to determine the model parameters of an experimental NES device whose behavior is governed by a geometric nonlinearity in its stiffness and a friction-based nonlinearity in its damping. The standard implementation of the UKF is compared with two implementation methods developed by the authors, which vary in their use of experimental responses to train the NES device model. The impact of choosing different prior distributions on the parameters is also analyzed through Latin hypercube sampling to enhance the quality of the identification for practical implementation, where the prior distribution on the parameters is often ill-defined. The identified models generated using one of the proposed UKF implementation methods is shown to provide a robust model of the NES, demonstrating that the UKF can be used for parameter identification with this class of devices.