Nonlinear resonances in a class of multi-degree-of-freedom systems

An analysis is presented of the superharmonic, subharmonic, and combination resonances in a multi-degree-of-freedom system which has cubic nonlinearity and modal viscous damping and is subject to harmonic excitation. It is shown that in the absence of internal resonances, the steady-state response contains only the modes which are directly excited. It is shown that in the presence of internal resonances, modes other than those that are directly excited can appear in the response. The strong influence of internal resonances is exhibited in numerical examples involving hinged-clamped beams. It is shown that when a multimode solution exists the lowest mode can dominate the response, even when it is not directly excited.