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Identification of nonlinear restoring force and dynamic loadings provides critical information for post-event damage diagnosis of structures. Due to high complexity and individuality of structural nonlinearities, it is difficult to provide an exact parametric mathematical model in advance to describe the nonlinear behavior of a structural member or a substructure under strong dynamic loadings in practice. Moreover, external dynamic loading applied to an engineering structure is usually unknown and only acceleration responses at limited degrees of freedom of the structure are available for identification. In this study, a nonparametric nonlinear restoring force and excitation identification approach combining the Legendre polynomial model and extended Kalman filter with unknown input is proposed using limited acceleration measurements fused with limited displacement measurements. Then, the performance of the proposed approach is first illustrated via numerical simulation with multi-degree-of-freedom frame structures equipped with magnetorheological dampers mimicking nonlinearity under direct dynamic excitation or base excitation using noise-polluted measurements. Finally, a dynamic experimental study on a four-story steel frame model equipped with a magnetorheological damper is carried out and dynamic response measurement is employed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing the identified dynamic responses, nonlinear restoring force, and excitation force with the test measurements. The convergence and the effect of initial estimation errors of structural parameters on the final identification results are investigated. The effect of data fusion on improving the identification accuracy is also investigated.

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