Background:
I have a piezoelectric force transducer that I am using to measure the force produced by a combustion reaction in a tube. The issue is that there is a lot of ringing that occurs during the reaction, leading to oscillatory "noise" going back and forth about the x-axis when we expect to see more of a big force curve. I want to eliminate this noise so that we can get a more proper idea of the force being generated.
My understanding:
The combustion reaction on the transducer can be modeled as a mass-spring-damper system with a forcing function. The mass (the tube + reactants, known), the spring (the transducer, known stiffness), the damper (transducer?, damping ratio TBD), and the forcing function (combustion, unknown).
If I can get the transducer's response to an impulse, I can use that to obtain an approximate transfer function for the impulse response using MATLAB. From here, I believe I should be able to deconvolve the force data and the impulse response in order to get the input force from the transducer.
Question:
What is the best way to generate an impulse signal that I may use for this task?
What I've tried:
I've done drop tests with two screws of two masses directly onto the transducer, but the data seems kind of inconsistent between the screws. I took the drop test signals, filtered out HF noise, subtracted the means, zeroed out everything before time t=0, and then normalized them according to the max force recorded. Then I used an impulse as the input (at t=0, input=1; 0 elsewhere) and the signal itself as the output for MATLAB's tfest function.
