A direct analysis of nonlinear systems with external periodic excitations via normal forms

Abstract

This study presents a direct methodology for a quantitative analysis of nonlinear dynamic systems with external periodic forcing via an application of the theory of normal forms. Rather than introducing a new state variable to reduce the problem to a homogeneous one, a set of time-dependant near-identity transformations is applied to construct the normal forms. In the process, the total response of the system is expressed as superposition of a steady state solution and a transient solution. A steady state solution of the system is obtained by the method of harmonic balance and the transient solution is obtained by solving a set of time periodic homological equations. The proposed method can be applied to time-invariant as well as time varying systems. After discussing the time-invariant case, the methodology is extended to systems with time-periodic coefficients. The case of time periodic systems is handled through an application of the Lyapunov–Floquet (L–F) transformation. Application of the L–F transformation produces a dynamically equivalent system in which the linear part of the system is time-invariant, making the system amenable to near-identity transformations. An example for each type of system, namely, constant coefficients and time-varying coefficients, is included to demonstrate effectiveness of the method. Various resonance conditions are discussed. It is observed that the linear parametric excitation term need not be small as generally assumed in perturbation and averaging techniques. Results obtained by proposed methods are compared with numerical solutions. Close agreements are found in some typical applications.