Reduced Order Characterization of Nonlinear Oscillations Using an Adaptive Phase-Amplitude Coordinate Framework

We propose a general strategy for reduced order modeling of systems that display highly nonlinear oscillations. By considering a continuous family of forced periodic orbits defined in relation to a stable fixed point and subsequently leveraging phase-amplitude-based reduction strategies, we arrive at a low order model capable of accurately capturing nonlinear oscillations resulting from arbitrary external inputs. In the limit that oscillations are small, the system dynamics relax to those obtained from local linearization, i.e., that can be fully described using linear eigenmodes. For larger amplitude oscillations, the behavior can be understood in terms of the dynamics of a small number of nonlinear modes. We illustrate the proposed strategy in a variety of examples yielding results that are substantially better than those obtained using standard linearization-based techniques.