Nonlinear vibrations of viscoelastic plane truss under harmonic excitation

This paper is concerned with the steady state bifurcations of a harmonically excited two-member plane truss system. A two-degree-of-freedom Duffing system having nonlinear fractional derivatives is derived to govern the dynamic behaviors of the truss system. Viscoelastic properties are described by the fractional Kelvin-Voigt model based on the Caputo definition. The combined method of harmonic balance and polynomial homotopy continuation is adopted to obtain steady state solutions analytically. A parametric study is conducted with the help of amplitude-response curves. Despite its seeming simplicity, the mechanical system exhibits a wide variety of structural responses. The primary and sub-harmonic resonances and chaos are found in specific regions of system parameters. The dynamic snap-through phenomena are observed when the forcing amplitude exceeds some critical values. Moreover, it has been shown that, suppression of undesirable responses can be achieved via changing of viscosity of the system. © 2014 World Scientific Publishing Company.