Periodically Forced Nonlinear Oscillators with Hysteretic Damping

We perform a detailed study of the dynamics of a nonlinear, one-dimensional oscillator driven by a periodic force under hysteretic damping, whose linear version was originally proposed and analyzed by Bishop (1955, "The Treatment of Damping Forces in Vibration Theory," Aeronaut. J., 59(539), pp. 738-742). We first add a small quadratic stiffness term in the constitutive equation and construct the periodic solution of the problem by a systematic perturbation method, neglecting transient terms as t→∞. We then repeat the analysis replacing the quadratic by a cubic term, which does not allow the solutions to escape to infinity. In both cases, we examine the dependence of the amplitude of the periodic solution on the different parameters of the model and discuss the differences with the linear model. We point out certain undesirable features of the solutions, which have also been alluded to in the literature for the linear Bishop's model, but persist in the nonlinear case as well. Finally, we discuss an alternative hysteretic damping oscillator model first proposed by Reid (1956, "Free Vibration and Hysteretic Damping," Aeronaut. J., 60(544), pp. 283-283), which appears to be free from these difficulties and exhibits remarkably rich dynamical properties when extended in the nonlinear regime.