Nonstationary Response of a Two-Degrees-of-Freedom Nonlinear Ship Model Under Modulated Excitation

Abstract

Abstract Nonstationary response of a two-degrees-of-freedom system with quadratic coupling under a time varying modulated amplitude sinusoidal excitation is studied. The nonlinearly coupled pitch and roll ship model is based on Nayfeh, Mook and Marshall’s work for the case of stationary excitation. The ship model has a 2:1 internal resonance and is excited near the resonance of the pitch mode. The modulated excitation (F0 + F1 cos ωt) cosQt is used to model a narrow band sea-wave excitation. The response demonstrates a variety of bifurcations, loss of stability, and chaos phenomena that are not present in the stationary case. We consider here the periodically modulated response. Chaotic response of the system is discussed in a separate paper. Several approximate solutions, under both small and large modulating amplitudes F1, are obtained and compared with the exact one. The stability of an exact solution with one mode having zero amplitude is studied. Loss of stability in this case involves either a rapid transition from one of two stable (in the stationary sense) branches to another, or a period doubling bifurcation. From Floquet theory, various stability boundary diagrams are obtained in F1 and F0 parameter space which can be used to predict the various transition phenomena and the period-2 bifurcations. The study shows that both the modulation parameters F1 and ω (the modulating frequency) have great effect on the stability boundaries. Because of the modulation, the stable area is greatly expanded, and the stationary bifurcation point can be exceeded without loss of stability. Decreasing ω can make the stability boundary very complicated. For very small ω the response can make periodic transitions between the two (pseudo) stable solutions.