[Paco, Hang]

Yesterday afternoon Paco and I measured the PRM L2P transfer function. We drove C1:SUS-PRM_LSC_EXC with a white noise in the 0-10 Hz band (effectively a white, longitudinal force applied to the suspension) and read out the pitch response in C1:SUS-PRM_OL_PIT_OUT. The local damping was left on during the measurement. Each FFT segment in our measurement is 32 sec and we used 8 non-overlapping segments for each measurement. The empirically determined results are also compared with the Fisher matrix estimation (similar to elog:16373).

Results:

Fig. 1 shows one example of the measured L2P transfer function. The gray traces are measurement data and shaded region the corresponding uncertainty. The olive trace is the best fit model. 

Note that for a single-stage suspension, the ideal L2P TF should have two zeros at DC and two pairs of complex poles for the length and pitch resonances, respectively. We found the two resonances at around 1 Hz from the fitting as expected. However, the zeros were not at DC as the ideal, theoretical model suggested. Instead, we found a pair of right-half plane zeros in order to explain the measurement results. If we cast such a pair of right-half plane zeros into (f, Q) pair, it means a negative value of Q. This means the system does not have the minimum phase delay and suggests some dirty cross-coupling exists, which might not be surprising. 

Fig. 2 compares the distribution of the fitting results for 4 different measurements (4 red crosses) and the analytical error estimation obtained using the Fisher matrix (the gray contours; the inner one is the 1-sigma region and the outer one the 3-sigma region). The Fisher matrix appears to underestimate the scattering from this experiment, yet it does capture the correlation between different parameters (the frequencies and quality factors of the two resonances).

One caveat though is that the fitting routine is not especially robust. We used the vectfit routine w/ human intervening to get some initial guesses of the model. We then used a standard scipy least-sq routine to find the maximal likelihood estimator of the restricted model (with fixed number of zeros and poles; here 2 complex zeros and 4 complex poles). The initial guess for the scipy routine was obtained from the vectfit model.  

Fig. 3 shows how we may shape our excitation PSD to maximize the Fisher information while keeping the RMS force applied to the PRM suspension fixed. In this case the result is very intuitive. We simply concentrate our drive around the resonance at ~ 1 Hz, focusing on locations where we initially have good SNR. So at least code is not suggesting something crazy... 

Fig. 4 then shows how the new uncertainty (3-sigma contours) should change as we optimize our excitation. Basically one iteration (from gray to olive) is sufficient here. 

We will find a time very recently to repeat the measurement with the optimized injection spectrum.