Modal damping and frequency variations in nonlinearly coupled oscillators with negative linear stiffness components

A method is applied here to extract the amplitude-dependent modal damping coefficients and frequencies of nonlinearly coupled oscillators with a nonlinear force in which a negative linear stiffness is incorporated. The proposed method can be directly applied into the equations of motion of the original system where the solution is not required to be obtained a priori. The exact nonlinear frequency content in the nonlinear coupling element is employed to obtain an equivalent amplitude-dependent stiffness element using a scaling parameter that preserves the exact frequency content in the original nonlinear element. Therefore, at each amplitude in the nonlinear coupling force, the modal damping coefficients and frequencies are calculated from the eigensolution of the instantaneous amplitude-dependent equivalent system. It is found that the modal damping content is strongly affected by the nonlinear frequency content where the modal damping coefficients become amplitude-dependent quantities. The obtained amplitude-dependent damping coefficients are plotted with respect to the potential energy of the nonlinear coupling force. The method is also applicable with larger degree-of-freedom nonlinear dynamical systems in which negative and nonnegative linear stiffness components are incorporated in the nonlinear coupling forces. The amplitude-dependent modal damping matrices of the amplitude-dependent equivalent systems are found to be satisfying all matrix similarity conditions with the linear modal damping matrix of the original system.