Sinusoidal excitation is particularly popular for testing structures in the nonlinear regime. Due to the nonlinear behavior and the inevitable feedback of the structure on the exciter, higher harmonics in the applied excitation are generated. This is undesired, because the acquired response may deviate substantially from that of the structure under purely sinusoidal excitation, in particular if one of the higher harmonics engages into resonance. We present a new approach to suppress those higher excitation harmonics and thus the unwanted exciter-structure interaction: Higher harmonics are added to the voltage input to the shaker whose Fourier coefficients are adjusted via feedback control until the excitation is purely sinusoidal. The stability of this method is analyzed for a simplified model; the resulting closed-form expressions are useful, among others, to select an appropriate exciter configuration, including the drive point. A practical procedure for the control design is suggested. The proposed method is validated in virtual and real experiments of internally resonant structures, in the two common configurations of force excitation via a stinger and base excitation. Excellent performance is achieved already when using the same control gains for all harmonics, throughout the tested range of amplitudes and frequencies, even in the strongly nonlinear regime. Compared to the iterative state of the art, it is found that the proposed method is simpler to implement, enables faster testing and it is easy to achieve a lower harmonic distortion.

It is known that isolated frequency response branches (isolas) can occur near primary resonances under modal interactions or nonlinear damping. The present work demonstrates how emergence and vanishing of such isolas can be systematically analyzed in an experiment. Feedback control of the phase is employed to track the phase-resonant backbone curve. In addition, the amplitude of the response is controlled, as the excitation level undergoes turning points in the presence of an isola. The acquired data indicates what excitation levels lead to the formation of an isola / its merging with the main branch. Some further analysis of the data permits to characterize possible internal resonances and amplitude-dependent damping. To assess the proposed method, a test rig is considered which involves two similar cantilevered beams undergoing soft collisions via a unilateral spring. A simplified model, which relies on linear modal damping and a massless unilateral spring, suggests that isolas should appear as a result of internal resonances. In contrast, the experiment shows an isola due to nonlinear damping. More specifically, the damping ratio first increases substantially due to the frictional dissipation in inevitable joints. Subsequently, the unilateral interactions scatter energy to other modes (in a non-resonant way), which have much lower damping. This leads to a sudden drop of the effective damping ratio with the amplitude, and leads to the formation of an isola.

Harmonic Balance is one of the most popular methods for computing periodic solutions of nonlinear dynamical systems. In this work, we address two of its major shortcomings: First, we investigate to what extent the computational burden of stability analysis can be reduced by consistent use of Chebyshev polynomials. Second, we address the problem of a rigorous error bound, which, to the authors' knowledge, has been ignored in all engineering applications so far. Here, we rely on Urabe's error bound and, again, use Chebyshev polynomials for the computationally involved operations. We use the error estimate to automatically adjust the harmonic truncation order during numerical continuation, and confront the algorithm with a state-of-the-art adaptive Harmonic Balance implementation. Further, we rigorously prove, for the first time, the existence of some isolated periodic solutions of the forced-damped Duffing oscillator with softening characteristic. We find that the effort for obtaining a rigorous error bound, in its present form, may be too high to be useful for many engineering problems. Based on the results obtained for a sequence of numerical examples, we conclude that Chebyshev-based stability analysis indeed permits a substantial speedup. Like Harmonic Balance itself, however, this method becomes inefficient when an extremely high truncation order is needed as, e.g., in the presence of (sharply regularized) discontinuities.

A characteristic feature of nonlinear vibrations is the energy transfer among different parts or modes of a mechanical system. Moreover, nonlinear vibrations are often non-periodic, even at steady state. To analyze these phenomena experimentally, the vibration response must be measured at multiple locations in a time-synchronous way. For this task, piezoelectric accelerometers are by far the most popular technology. While the effect of attached sensors on linear vibration properties is well-known (mass loading in particular), the purpose of the present work is to assess their intrusiveness on nonlinear vibrations. To this end, we consider a compressor blade that undergoes impacts near the tip for sufficiently large vibrations. We consider two configurations, one in which five triaxial piezoelectric accelerometers are glued to the blade surface and one without sensors attached. In both configurations, the vibration response is measured using a multi-point laser Doppler vibrometer. In the linear case without impacts, the lowest-frequency bending mode merely sees the expected slight frequency shift due to mass loading. In the nonlinear vibro-impact case, unexpectedly, the near-resonant response to harmonic base excitation changes severely both quantitatively and qualitatively. In particular, pronounced strongly modulated responses and period doubling are observed only in the case without attached sensors. We conjecture that this is due to a considerable increase of damping, caused by the sensor cables, affecting mainly the higher-frequency modes.

The present work addresses the experimental identification of amplitude-dependent modal parameters (modal frequency, damping ratio, Fourier coefficients of periodic modal oscillation). Phase-resonant testing has emerged as an important method for this task, as it substantially reduces the amount of data required for the identification compared to conventional frequency response testing at different excitation/response levels. In the case of shaker-stinger excitation, the applied excitation force is commonly measured in order to quantify the amplitude-dependent modal damping ratio from the phase-resonant test data. In the case of base excitation, however, the applied excitation force is challenging or impossible to measure. In this work we develop an original method for damping quantification from phase-resonant tests. It relies solely on response measurement; it avoids the need to resort to force measurement. The key idea is to estimate the power provided by the distributed inertia force imposed by the base motion. We develop both a model-free and a model-based variant of the method. We validate the developed method first in virtual experiments of a friction-damped and a geometrically nonlinear system, and then in a physical experiment involving a thin beam clamped at both ends via bolted joints. We conclude that the method is highly robust and provides high accuracy already for a reasonable number of sensors.

It is well-known that nonlinear dry friction damping has the potential to bound the otherwise unboundedly growing vibrations of self-excited structures. An important technical example are the flutter-induced friction-damped limit cycle oscillations of turbomachinery blade rows. Due to symmetries, natural frequencies are inevitably closely spaced, and they can generally be multiples of each other. Not much is known on the nonlinear dynamics of self-excited friction-damped systems in the presence of such internal resonances. In this work, we analyze this situation numerically by regarding a two degrees-of-freedom system. We demonstrate that in the case of closely-spaced natural frequencies, the self-excitation of the lower-frequency mode gives rise to non-periodic oscillations, and the occurrence of unbounded behavior well before reaching the maximum friction damping value. If the system is close to a 1:3 internal resonance, limit cycles associated with much higher frictional damping appear, however, most of these are unstable. If more than one mode is subjected to self-excitation, the maximum resistance against self-excitation is at least given by the damping capacity of the most weakly friction-damped mode. These results are of high technical relevance, as the prevailing practice is to analyze only periodic limit states and argue the stability solely by the slope of the damping-amplitude curve. Our results demonstrate that this practice leads to considerable mis- and overestimation of the resistance against self-excitation, and a more rigorous stability analysis is required.

It is widely known that dry friction damping can bound the self-excited vibrations induced by negative damping. The vibrations typically take the form of (periodic) limit cycle oscillations. However, when the intensity of the self-excitation reaches a condition of maximum friction damping, the limit cycle loses stability via a fold bifurcation. The behavior may become even more complicated in the presence of any internal resonance conditions. In this work, we consider a two-degree-of-freedom system with an elastic dry friction element (Jenkins element) having closely spaced natural frequencies. The symmetric in-phase motion is subjected to self-excitation by negative (viscous) damping, while the symmetric out-of-phase motion is positively damped. In a previous work, we showed that the limit cycle loses stability via a secondary Hopf bifurcation, giving rise to quasi-periodic oscillations. A further increase in the self-excitation intensity may lead to chaos and finally divergence, long before reaching the fold bifurcation point of the limit cycle. In this work, we use the method of complexification-averaging to obtain the slow flow in the neighborhood of the limit cycle. This way, we show that chaos is reached via a cascade of period-doubling bifurcations on invariant tori. Using perturbation calculus, we establish analytical conditions for the emergence of the secondary Hopf bifurcation and approximate analytically its location. In particular, we show that non-periodic oscillations are the typical case for prominent nonlinearity, mild coupling (controlling the proximity of the modes), and sufficiently light damping. The range of validity of the analytical results presented herein is thoroughly assessed numerically. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work that shows how the challenging Jenkins element can be treated formally within a consistent perturbation approach in order to derive closed-form analytical results for limit cycles and their bifurcations.

In this work we apply and compare two numerical path continuation algorithms for solving algebraic equations arising when applying the Harmonic Balance Method to compute periodic regimes of nonlinear dynamical systems. The first algorithm relies on a predictor-corrector scheme and an Alternating Frequency-Time approach. This algorithm can be applied directly also to non-analytic nonlinearities. The second algorithm relies on a high-order Taylor series expansion of the solution path (the so-called Asymptotic Numerical Method) and can be formulated entirely in the frequency domain. The series expansion can be viewed as a high-order predictor equipped with inherent error estimation capabilities, which permits to avoid correction steps. The second algorithm is limited to analytic nonlinearities, and typically additional variables need to be introduced to cast the equation system into a form that permits the efficient computation of the required high-order derivatives. We apply the algorithms to selected vibration problems involving mechanical systems with polynomial stiffness, dry friction and unilateral contact nonlinearities. We assess the influence of the algorithmic parameters of both methods to draw a picture of their differences and similarities. We analyze the computational performance in detail, to identify bottlenecks of the two methods.

In this work we apply and compare two algorithms for setting up Harmonic Balance equations and numerical continuation of the solution path for harmonically driven mechanical systems. The first algorithm relies on a predictor-corrector scheme and an Alternating Frequency-Time approach (AFT-PreCo). The second algorithm relies on a high-order Taylor series expansion of the solution path (asymptotic numerical method) and classical Harmonic Balance formulated entirely in the frequency domain (cHB-ANM). We conclude that the cHB-ANM is suited for smooth nonlinearities, for instance geometrically nonlinear finite element models. Here, cHB-ANM avoids aliasing errors and convinces with a numerically robust adjustment of the continuation step length and a continuous representation of the solution path. For non-smooth nonlinearities such as stick-slip friction or unilateral constraints, AFT-PreCo is better suited, and convinces with high numerical robustness and efficiency. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.