Interactions of propagating waves in a one-dimensional chain of linear oscillators with a strongly nonlinear local attachment

We study the interaction of propagating wavetrains in a one-dimensional chain of coupled linear damped oscillators with a strongly nonlinear, lightweight, dissipative local attachment which acts, in essence, as nonlinear energy sink - NES. Both symmetric and highly un-symmetric NES configurations are considered, labelled S-NES and U-NES, respectively, with strong (in fact, non-linearizable or nearly non-linearizable) stiffness nonlinearity. Especially for the case of U-NES we show that it is capable of effectively arresting incoming slowly modulated pulses with a single fast frequency by scattering the energy of the pulse to a range of frequencies, by locally dissipating a major portion of the incoming energy, and then by backscattering residual waves upstream. As a result, the wave transmission past the location of the NES is minimized, and the NES acts, in effect, as passive wave arrestor and reflector. Analytical reduced-order modeling of the dynamics is performed through complexification/averaging. In addition, governing nonlinear dynamics is studied computationally and compared to the analytical predictions. Results from the reduced order model recover the exact computational simulations.