The harmonic balance method for advanced analysis and design of nonlinear mechanical systems

As a tool for analyzing nonlinear large-scale structures, the harmonic balance (HB) method has recently received increasing attention in the structural dynamics community. However, its use was so far limited to the approximation and study of periodic solutions, and other methods as the shooting and orthogonal collocation techniques were usually preferred to further analyze these solutions and to study their bifurcations. This is why the present paper intends to demonstrate how one can take advantage of the HB method as an efficient alternative to the cited techniques. Two different applications are studied, namely the normal modes of a spacecraft and the optimization of the design of a vibration absorber. The interesting filtering feature of the HB method and the implementation of an efficient bifurcation tracking extension are illustrated

O "zvezni" pristojnosti ali Prevzetnost in prilastitev

Because nowadays structural engineers are willing to use or at least understand nonlinearities instead of simply avoiding them, there is a need for numerical tools performing analysis of nonlinear large-scale structures. Among these techniques, the harmonic balance (HB) method is certainly one of the most commonly used to study finite element models with reasonably complex nonlinearities. However, in its classical formulation the HB method is limited to the approximation of periodic solutions. For this reason, the present paper proposes to extend the method to the detection and tracking of codimension-1 bifurcations in the system parameters space. As an application, the frequency response of a spacecraft is studied, together with two nonlinear phenomena, namely quasiperiodic oscillations and detached resonance curves. This example illustrates how bifurcation tracking using the HB method can be employed as a promising design tool for detecting and eliminating such undesired behaviors