Experimental research on the influence of modal nonlinearities of paintings under mechanical loads

In the traditional transportation of paintings and the design of the packaging systems, paintings are usually assumed to behave like a linear system. In order to verify this hypothesis, in this contribution, by means of a hammer experiment and a sweep excitation experiment to simulate the shock and vibration during transportation, respectively, the modal nonlinearities of two real paintings and a dummy painting are experimentally studied. The experimental results show that paintings can be treated as a linear system only when being subjected to shock, but the modal nonlinearities of paintings cannot be ignored when being subjected to vibration. The general behaviour of the paintings modal nonlinearities is then summarised based on experimental results, and their consequences for painting transportation are discussed. First of all, the offset of the resonance frequency is the most important problem which will lead to failure of the original vibration isolation measures. Further, the decrease in the resonance peak amplitude will increase the probability of the eigenmode being excited. Besides, it is also necessary to attenuate the harmonic vibrations of paintings. Lastly, the different modal characteristics obtained by a sweep with increasing and decreasing frequency make the analysis of different excitation schemes more complicated. Therefore, the identification of the paintings modal nonlinearities is necessary and important.