One particular system has this input signal:
The output is given by:
Is this system LTI?
In this example, the input is a rectangular pulse that can be analyzed as the superposition of two step functions that are separated in time, one positive-going and the other negative-going. This makes the analysis easy, since you can see the initial response to the first step function then determine whether the response following the second step is a linear combination of two copies of the first part of the response.
In this case, the response to the first step function at t = 0 is that the output starts rising linearly, also at t = 0. The second (negative) input step function occurs at t = 0.5, and if the system is LTI, you would expect the output to also change what it’s doing at that time. In fact, you would expect the output to level off at whatever value it had reached at that time, because the LTI response to the second step should be a negative-going linear ramp, which, when added to the original response, should cancel out.
However, this is not the output signal received, so this system is definitely not LTI.
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