Nonlinear distortion introduced by an amplifier when subjected to a multisine excitation decreases the measurement accuracy in many metrological and measurement areas. In this paper, we performed qualitative and quantitative analyses of the nonlinear distortion with the multisine excitations constrained by a constant power spectral density. We present the numerical results with respect to different tone spacings,nonlinear orders, harmonic phases and tone distributions. Moreover, three as-pects of contributions are made to further reveal the distortion mechanism. First, we find that the type Ⅱ components for Schr- oeder-phase multisines distribute uniformly but not all in anti-phase to the type I components for the second order nonlinearity. Second,we simulate the variance of the type I and Ⅱ components and their summation to explain the principle of reducing the type Ⅱ distortion by averaging the results obtained using multiple realizations of random-phase multisines. Third, we observe a special distortion distribution mechanism for the Schroeder-phase multisine excitation The results contribute to a better estima-tion and understanding of the nonlinear distortion.
