A nonlinear identification technique is presented to obtain the damping of isotropic and laminated sandwich
rectangular plates and curved panels subjected to harmonic excitation as a function of the vibration amplitude. The
response of the structures is approximated by (i) reduced-order models with 10 to 100 degrees of freedom and (ii) a
single-degree of freedom Duffing oscillator. The method uses experimental frequency-amplitude data and the leastsquares
technique to identify parameters and reconstruct frequency-response curves by spanning the excitation
frequency in the neighbourhood of the lowest natural frequencies. In order to obtain the experimental data, a
sophisticated measuring technique has been used. The results reveal a strongly nonlinear correlation between the
damping and the vibration amplitude.
