Transient Chaos in Platform-vibrator with Shock

Abstract

Platform-vibrator with shock is widely used in the construction industry for compacting and molding large concrete products. Its mathematical model, created in our previous work, meets all the basic requirements of shock-vibration technology for the precast concrete production on low-frequency resonant platform-vibrators. This model corresponds to the two-body 2-DOF vibro-impact system with a soft impact. It is strongly nonlinear non-smooth discontinuous system. This is unusual vibro-impact system due to its specific properties. The upper body, with a very large mass, breaks away from the lower body a very short distance, and then falls down onto the soft constraint that causes a soft impact. Then it bounces and falls again, and so on. A soft impact is simulated with nonlinear Hertzian contact force. This model exhibited many unique phenomena inherent in nonlinear non-smooth dynamical systems with varying control parameters. In this paper, we demonstrate the transient chaos in a vibro-impact system. Our finding of transient chaos in platform-vibrator with shock, besides being a remarkable phenomenon by itself, provides an understanding of the dynamical processes that occur in the platform-vibrator when varying the technological mass of the mold with concrete. Phase trajectories, Poincaré maps, graphs of time series and contact forces, Fourier spectra, the largest Lyapunov exponent, and wavelet characteristics are used in numerical investigations to determine the chaotic and periodic phases of the realization. We show both the dependence of the transient chaos on the control parameter value and the sensitive dependence on the initial conditions. We hope that this analysis can help avoid undesirable platform-vibrator behaviour during design and operation due to inappropriate system parameters, since transient chaos may be a dangerous and unwanted state of a vibro-impact system.