Abstract
This paper investigates the dynamics of an air-bearing slider by using experiments, simulation and nonlinear dynamics analysis. The advanced nonlinear, non-stationary dynamical invariants of the responses from experiments and simulations are examined and evaluated to characterize the nonlinear dynamics properties, which includes recurrence plot and the largest Lyapunov exponents. It is found that real system response from experiments exhibit both regular and non-regular periodicity, and non-stationary, whereas simulation results are unable to comprehensively characterize these properties due to the simplification of modeling in which only stationary nonlinear properties are included. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.