Over the past four decades considerable work has been done in the area of power spectrum estimation. The information contained within the power spectrum relates to a signal's autocorrelation or 'second-order statistics'. The power spectrum provides a complete statistical description of a gaussian process; however a problem with this information is that it is phase blind. This problem is addressed if one turns to a system's frequency response function (FRF). The FRF graphs the magnitude and phase of the frequency response of a system; in order to do this it requires information regarding the frequency content of the input and output signals. Situations arise in science and engineering whereby signal analysts are required to look beyond second-order statistics and analyse a signal's higher-order statistics (HOS). Higher-order statistics or spectra give information on a signal's deviation from gaussianity and consequently are a good indicator function for the presence of nonlinearity within a system. One of the main problems in nonlinear system identification is that of high modal density. Many modeling schemes involve making some expansion of the nonlinear restoring force in terms of polynomial or other basis terms. If more than one degree-of-freedom is involved this becomes a multivariate problem and the number of candidate terms in the expansion grows explosively with the order of nonlinearity and the number of degrees-of-freedom. This paper attempts to use HOS to detect and quantify nonlinear behaviour for a number of symmetrical and antisymmetrical systems over a range of degrees of freedom. In doing so the paper also attempts to show that HOS are a more sensitive tool than the FRF in detecting nonlinearity. Furthermore, the object of this paper is to try and identify which modes couple in a nonlinear manner in order to reduce the number of candidate coupling terms, for a model, as much as possible. The bispectrurn method has previously been applied to simple low-DOF systems with high symmetry and has been shown to work well in this limited case. The current paper will consider a model of a continuous Wing-Pylon model with reduced symmetry in order to assess the utility of the method in a more general situation, the analysis is extended to assess the utility of the trispectrum.
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