Experimental investigation of the response of a harmonically excited hard Duffing oscillator

Abstract

A single degree-of-freedom torsional vibratory system, which constitutes a third-order dissipative dynamical system, has been fabricated as a mechanical analogue of hard Duffing equation with strong nonlinearity. The forced response of the system reveals complicated and chaotic motion at low frequency regime. Besides usual jump phenomenon, unpredictable jump phenomenon with two and three coexisting periodic attractors is also observed.