We investigate theoretically and experimentally the nonlinear responses of a clamped-clamped buckled beam to a variety of external harmonic excitations and internal resonances. We assume that the beam geometry is uniform and its material is homogeneous. We initially buckle the beam by an axial force beyond the critical load of the first buckling mode, and then we apply a transverse harmonic excitation that is uniform over its span. The beam is modeled according to the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory and small strains and moderate rotation approximations are assumed. We derive the equation of motion governing the nonlinear transverse planar vibrations and associated boundary conditions using the extended Hamilton's principle. The governing equation is a nonlinear integral-partial-differential equation in space and time that possesses quadratic and cubic nonlinearities. A closed-form solution for such equations is not available and hence we seek approximate solutions.

We use perturbation methods to investigate the slow dynamics in the neighborhood of an equilibrium configuration. A Galerkin approximation is used to discretize the nonlinear partial-differential equation governing the beam's response and obtain a set of nonlinearly coupled ordinary-differential equations governing the time evolution of the response. We based our theory on a multi-mode Galerkin discretization. To investigate the large-amplitude dynamics, we use a shooting method to numerically integrate the discretized equations and obtain periodic orbits. The stability and bifurcations of these periodic orbits are investigated using Floquet theory.

We solve the nonlinear buckling problem to determine the buckled configurations as a function of the applied axial load. We compare the static buckled configurations obtained from the discretized equations with the exact ones. We find out that the number of modes retained in the discretization has a significant effect on these static configurations.

We consider three cases: primary resonance, subharmonic resonance of order one-half of the first vibration mode, and one-to-one internal resonance between the first and second modes.

We obtain interesting dynamics, such as phase-locked and quasiperiodic motions, resulting from a Hopf bifurcation, snapthrough motions, and a sequence of period-doubling bifurcations leading to chaos.

To validate our theoretical results, we ran an experiment, which is a modified version of the experiment designed by Kreider and Nayfeh. We find that the obtained theoretical results are in good qualitative agreement with the experimental results. In the case of one-to-one internal resonance, we report, theoretically and experimentally, energy transfer between the first mode, which is externally excited, and the second mode.